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LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two Gooles Received 

FES 9 1906 

(J Copyright Entry 
CLASS <t XXc. No, 

/ 3 i v « Z S 



COPY A. 



Copyright, 1906, by 
EATON & MAINS. 



Co mp JFrtenO 
2Dr* George JJO* <£cfemau 

Cfcta Volume id 
affectionately isDeUtcateO 



BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 



This volume is the fourth member of a quar- 
tet, following in line The Great Sinners of the 
Bible, The Great Saints of the Bible, and The Great 
Portraits of the Bible. The previous volumes have 
been so generously treated by the public that I am 
encouraged to send this forth to the friends already 
made by them, with the hope that it may be found 
worthy of fellowship with the others and with an 
added note of advancement. It deals with great 
themes. The Great Promises of the Bible are the 
sure anchors that will hold in any storm. These 
sermons were preached in Grace Methodist Epis- 
copal Church, New York City. They were blessed 
of God, on their delivery, to the comfort and salva- 
tion of many people, and they are sent forth with 
a prayer that the presence of the Holy Spirit may 
be felt in the printed page. 

Louis Albert Banks. 

Nyack-on-the-Hudson, 
January 25, 1906. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The Promise of a New Heart 9 

II. The Promise of Forgiveness 20 

III. The Promise of Sympathy 30 

IV. The Promise of Answers to Prayer 39 

V. The Promise of Peace 50 

VI. The Promise of Friendship 61 

VII. The Promise of Hope 71 

VIII. The Promise of Angelic Companionship 80 

IX. The Promise of Sleep 89 

X. The Promised Hiding Place 100 

XI. The Promised Escape 112 

XII. God's Promised Delight in His Children 124 

XIII. The Promise of an Unchangeable Saviour . . . 135 

XIV. The Peacemaker's Promise 146 

XV. The Four Wheels of Divine Promise 157 

XVI. The Promised Conquest of the Imagination. . 171 

XVII. Christ's Promise to a Tired World 183 

XVIII. Promised Security for Spiritual Treasures. . . . 192 

XIX. The Promised Home of the Soul 205 



8 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XX. The Promised Reservoir 215 

XXI. The Promise of Satisfaction 228 

XXII. The Promise of Grace to Bear the Thorn 239 

XXIII. The Promised Guardianship of the Soul 251 

XXIV. The Promise of the Rainbow 260 

XXV. The Promised Measure of Reward 270 

XXVI. A Man Who Never Staggered at the Promises 

of God 280 

XXVII. The Promise of Victory 291 

XXVIII. The Promise of the Morning 302 

XXIX. The Promised Reward of the Overcomers.. . . 313 

XXX. The Promise of Immortality 323 



THE GREAT PROMISES OF 
THE BIBLE 



i 

The Promise of a jSTew Heart 

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit 
will I put within you: and I will take away the stony 
heart out of your flesh. — Ezekiel xxxvi, 26. 

One of the wonders of Arizona is its petrified 
forest, or rather, forests, for there are many of 
them. In a small group of trees recently discov- 
ered the sandstone has worn away, leaving exposed 
huge trees standing like the pillars of some ancient 
temple. The roots of these trees run into the 
solid rock. One has been discovered, standing on 
the summit of a hill, which is the giant of all the 
petrified forests. It is twenty-seven feet in cir- 
cumference, with roots embedded in the solid rock. 
The bark is perfectly preserved in agatized form 
and is five inches thick. In the rocks about this 
tree are impressions of branches, leaves, and even 
cones and fruits. This tree, it is thought, was like 



10 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

the present giant redwoods of California — cer- 
tainly it must have been the giant of this great 
forest of prehistoric times. Some years ago some 
capitalists staked out a mining claim in one of 
these forests, and undertook to manufacture emery 
dust by grinding these petrified trees to powder. 
But it was soon demonstrated that the tree trunks 
were too hard to lend themselves to a wholesale 
commercial use. In fact, it is estimated that the 
hardness of the average piece of petrified wood is 
seven-tenths that of the diamond. 

"We have in these petrified trees an illustration 
of what takes place in the human heart. There 
are influences all the time at work in the world 
which if given free play will make the heart as 
hard as one of these petrified trees, until it will 
become what Ezekiel calls "the stony heart." We 
are constantly seeing illustrations of the effect of 
avarice and greed upon the heart of a man or a 
woman, until the affections and sympathies seem 
to be petrified in the soul, and the suffering of 
others has no more effect than it would have upon 
a rock. Shakespeare was right when, in the Mer- 
chant of Venice, he makes Antonio, speaking of 
the effect of avarice on the heart of Shylock, de- 
clare that a human heart thus petrified is the 
hardest and most cruel thing in the world. Speak- 



THE PEOillSE OF A NEW HEART 



11 



ing of the futility of trying to arouse mercy in 
Shylock's heart., he says : 

"You may as well go stand upon the beach, 
And bid the main flood bate his usual height; 
You may as well use question with the wolf, 
Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb; 
You may as well forbid the mountain pines 
To wag their high tops, and to make no noise, 
When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven; 
You may as well do anything most hard, 
As seek to soften that — than which what's harder? — 
His heart." 

But selfishness, which is the great hardener of 
the heart, does not always take the form of avarice 
or greed. A self-indulgence which seeks its own 
comfort with indifference to the comfort of others 
will soon make the heart as hard as adamant. The 
natural effect of self-indulgence is to close the 
eyes and dull the heart so that it cannot see or 
feel the needs of others. Many a man by his very 
success thus loses his best self. There is a story of 
an Italian nobleman who built his enemy into the 
wall of his castle. He set him there alive, and 
piled the great stones about him, leaving him there 
to perish in the heart of the great building. There 
are thousands of men and women who are doing 
the same thing with their own souls. They are 
making money, they are being successful, but they 



12 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



are burying themselves while they are doing it. 
The heart within them is becoming petrified. 
They do not enjoy men and women as much, they 
are not so tender and sympathetic toward their 
fellows, and have nothing like the hope and faith 
in God which they had years ago. The heart is 
changing to stone. 

We need to listen to this message as Christians, 
for there is always the danger that while we are 
theoretically Christians, and are entirely orthodox 
in our creed and correct in all the outward and 
formal services of the church, our hearts will be- 
come to a certain extent petrified and indifferent, 
and we shall lose that vital and tender association 
with Christ and our brethren which is the very 
life and soul of Christianity. Dr. J. H. Jowett, 
the English preacher, in the annual sermon of the 
London Missionary Society, took for his text 
those remarkable words of Paul where he says, 
"Fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of 
Christ." He sees in these words a window into 
the heart of the great apostle to the Gentiles. He 
was so sensitively in touch with Jesus Christ that 
it put him into tender and sensitive kinship with 
every man and woman in the world. All the 
stone had gone out of Paul's heart and his heart 
was alive to anything that touched his brother with 



THE PKOMISE OF A NEW HEAET 13 



affliction. He cried out: "Who is weak and I am 
not weak ? who is offended and I burn not ?" And 
I must confess that I have been greatly moved with 
the heart cry of Dr. Jowett as he inquires : "My 
brethren, are we in this succession ? Does the cry 
of the world's need pierce the heart, and ring even 
through the fabric of our dreams % Do we 'fill up' 
our Lord's sufferings, or are we the unsympathetic 
ministers of a mighty passion % I am amazed how 
easily I become callous. I am ashamed how small 
and insensitive is the surface which I present to 
the needs and sorrows of the world. I so easily 
become enwrapt in the soft wool of self-indulgences 
and the cries from far and near cannot reach my 
easeful soul." 

A young missionary who had come home from 
the foreign field sick, and was anxious to get well 
that he might go back, was asked by a friend why 
he wished to return, and the answer was a revela- 
tion to the man who asked it. "Because I can't 
sleep for thinking of them !" was the reply. There 
was a heart with no stone in it. To all that 
heathen world, with its wicked men and benighted 
women and groveling children, his heart was as 
tender and sensitive as a mother's. But how easy 
it is for us to settle down into a dull and heavy 
lethargy, until the heart begins to petrify, in our 



14 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

relation to the lost both at home and abroad. How 
the world would be kindled with flames of divine 
fire if every Christian heart could be thoroughly 
quickened into life and sympathy ! 

Mrs. Josephine Butler, in her Life of Saint 
Catherine, tells us that Catherine told a friend 
that the anguish which she experienced in the 
realization of the sufferings of Christ was the 
greatest at the moment when she was pleading for 
the salvation of others. a Promise me that thou 
wilt save them!" she cried, and, stretching forth 
her right hand to Jesus, she again implored in 
agony, "Promise me, dear Lord, that thou wilt 
save them ! 0, give me a token that thou wilt !" 
Then her Lord seemed to clasp her outstretched 
hand in his, and to give her the promise, and she 
felt a piercing pain as though a nail had been 
driven through the palm. 

Brothers, sisters, do we know anything of what 
that means, or is it all a dead language to us? 
Are we being buried in self-indulgence ? Are we 
so lost in having a good time, or so immersed in 
care for the conditions of this present life, that 
the sufferings of Christ for the salvation of the 
world and the lost condition of our fellow men 
about us do not get into our hearts so that we 
are conscious of it ? May the Spirit of the living 



THE PROMISE OF A NEW HEAET 15 

God awake us! May the Spirit that aroused 
Ezekiel's valley of dry bones, the Spirit that first 
called us to repentance, call us again with an 
electric call that will awaken and arouse us fully 
to the life of the Spirit ! 

But if there be this solemn message to those 
who have entered upon the Christian life, how 
solemn is that message to you who have given 
yourself over to your way and have refused to 
yield in any way to the persuasions of Christ, who 
offers to be your Saviour! Is it not true that 
some of your hearts are not only petrified so that 
there is no love to God or Christ, but that your 
ideas of Christ are becoming every year more 
vague and unreal, so that there is less likelihood 
that he will become your personal Saviour ? Your 
cold and stony heart affects your vision of Christ, 
so that Christ seems as hard and helpless as is 
your own spiritual nature. 

A novelist has told the story of an Alpine guide 
who was engaged to be married to a Swiss girl. A 
few days before the time set for the wedding the 
girl started off to visit some relatives living on the 
other side of the mountain. She laughed a fare- 
well as she ascended the steep hillside and waved 
a bunch of flowers which she held in her hand as 
she passed out of sight of her friends. It was the 



16 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

last they ever saw of her. She never returned, 
and no one knew what had become of her. When 
her lover heard of her disappearance he set off 
up the path to seek her, but came back alone with 
a broken heart. Then he collected building ma- 
terials, and, refusing all proffered aid, he bore 
them away up, no one knew where, took supplies 
of food, and forbade any to trace him to his lonely 
haunt. When the spring came he returned to the 
village, took up his place among the guides, and 
had his share of the mountain-climbing connected 
with the visitors who came. But although he was 
an excellent guide he was so morose and sullen 
that he was never a favorite. Some heavy load 
seemed to lay upon his heart and crush all joy and 
hope out of it. Eighteen years passed away, and 
then the springtime came and he did not appear 
with the rest of the guides. The old men of the 
town, who remembered the sad story of his youth, 
organized a search for him; they traversed gla- 
ciers and ice tracks they had never crossed before, 
till they came to a solitary hut at the edge of a 
deep crevasse. They knocked at the door, but 
there was no answer. Then they broke in the 
door, and found the guide lying upon a couch, 
cold in death. 

Then the secret of his strange life became evi- 



THE PROMISE OE A NEW HEART 17 

dent to them. For there, standing by, was the 
figure of the girl he had loved long years before. 
The familiar color was in her cheek, the flowers 
upon her breast; but a peculiar, steely kind of 
light enveloped her and they thought they saw a 
vision. At last one of them put forth his hand 
and touched the ice that formed her coffin. For 
eighteen years, so the author's fancy pictures, the 
Swiss guide had lived, unseen by mortal eye, with 
the image of his betrothed enshrined within a 
mold of ice. 

Though this may be but a grim fancy of fiction, 
it is strikingly true as an illustration of our 
theme. For are there not some who hear me to 
whom Christ is no more than that? Instead of 
your heart beating in unison with his, and the 
divine love from his eyes — the love that trans- 
formed the life of Zacchasus and which has lost 
none of its power — streaming into yours, he is 
void of life and is clothed to your imagination 
with an icy coffin of speculation and theory. You 
believe in the historic Christ just the same as you 
did when you were a child, but the life, the soul, 
the living divine personality, near enough to 
touch you with his hand and give you peace — all 
that is gone. You say beautiful things, it may be, 
about Christ, and you think of him as a beautiful 
2 



18 THE GEE AT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

character, but he is the stone Christ, and there is 
in him no power to give you good cheer and hope 
and fill your life with the warmth and courage of 
immortality. 

When Dr. F. E. Clark was last in India he 
held an interesting religious service in the Taj 
Mahal, which is the most wonderful tomb in the 
world. Twenty thousand men worked for twenty- 
two years on the marvelous building. In it sleep 
the mortal remains of a dead princess. Dr. Clark 
and a dozen Christians gathered under the mar- 
velous dome within the tomb, and read the Scrip- 
ture and sang and prayed. Their words echoed 
and reechoed and echoed again a hundred times. 
When they sang, the musical tones were repro- 
duced until it seemed as if a choir of ten thousand 
angels had taken up the song and was chanting the 
refrain begun on earth. And yet they had to go 
away and leave it only a tomb. But suppose they 
had had the power to have spoken life into that 
place of death, and brought back the princess to 
her youth and health and beauty and strength? 
Thank God, that is what Jesus can do to petrified 
hearts. He will come into your heart where many 
beautiful things are buried, and he will bring 
them again to life and power. He will take away 
the stony heart and give you a heart of flesh. Do 



THE PEOMISE OF A NEW HEAET 19 

not make the blunder of trying to live the Chris- 
tian life without the Christian heart. But to 
obtain the Christian heart you must obey Christ. 
He knocks at the door. Open the door and let 
him in. When he walked with the two disciples 
out to Emmaus he was going on until they begged 
him to stop and break bread with them. Has he 
not walked down the street with you many a day 
until he came to your door, and looked fondly on 
you, but you did not invite him in % Has he not 
often come to sit down beside you in the church, 
and while the sermon has gone on you have felt 
that he was sitting there, his shoulder touching 
against yours, but you went home without him? 
My friend, he alone is able to change this petrified 
heart into a heart quick with life and love and 
hope and faith, a life that shall blossom into joy, 
that shall bear the fruit of peace, and shall be 
green and flourishing through all the ages of 
eternity. 



20 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



II 

The Promise of Forgiveness 
Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven. — Luke vi, 37. 

There is no stronger, more solemn word in the 
Bible than the word "forgiveness." The power 
to forgive is the very scepter of the majesty of 
God. David expresses the thought most sublimely 
in the one hundred and thirtieth psalm when he 
says, in one of the greatest of his sentences, "But 
there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest 
be feared." 

We sometimes talk glibly about the forgiveness 
of sins, and about forgiveness between man and 
man, as though it were a very easy thing to do. 
But it is not easy. Forgiveness, if it be on God's 
part, can only take place when there is a change 
on our part which justifies the Judge of all the 
earth in pardoning us in the name of Christ, who 
died on the cross for our redemption. And for- 
giveness between man and man is something that 
enters into the very core of our being. It does 
not come easy; it is the very climax of the Chris- 
tian spirit. 



THE PEOMISE OF FOKGIVENESS 21 



It is told of the great Puritan preacher, Dr. 
John Owen, who wrote a book on the psalm to 
which I have referred, and largely on the verse 
about forgiveness, that he came to write the book 
in this way: A youth came to see him in deep 
distress of soul. Owen questioned him closely. 
"Young man, in what manner do you think to go 
to God?" "Through the Mediator, sir/' was the 
reply. "Ah ! that is easily said, but I assure you 
it is another thing to go to God through the 
Mediator than many who make use of the ex- 
pression are aware of. I myself preached Christ 
some years, when I had but very little, if any, 
experimental acquaintance with access to God 
through Christ, until the Lord was pleased to 
visit me with affliction, whereby I was brought 
to the mouth of the grave, and under which my 
soul was oppressed with horror and darkness, 
when God graciously relieved my spirit by a 
powerful application of the words of the psalmist, 
'But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou 
mayest be feared.' " That is the testimony of the 
Puritan. 

It is interesting to note, also, that the beginning 
of John Wesley's perception of justification by 
faith came from hearing this psalm sung in Saint 
Paul's Cathedral in London. Young Wesley, as 



22 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



he listened to the singing of this message about 
forgiveness, had borne into his heart the great 
confidence that a man might know that his sins 
were forgiven and might rest in perfect peace, 
being justified by faith. 

It is exceedingly important to note, in consider- 
ing this promise of Jesus Christ, that the condi- 
tion to forgiveness on the part of God is a forgiv- 
ing heart in our own breasts. Our forgiveness is 
to come before God's does. So long as we cherish 
spite and revenge in our hearts toward our fellow 
men God cannot forgive us. Only the heart that 
has itself forgiven is in the proper attitude to 
receive divine forgiveness. 

A missionary in Greenland tells of a young 
Greenlander who said to him one day, "I do love 
Jesus — I would do anything for him; how good 
of him to die for me !" 

The missionary said to him, "Are you sure you 
would do anything for our dear Lord V 

a Yes, I would do anything for him. What can 
I do V 9 

The missionary, holding up the Bible before 
him, said. "This book says, Thou shalt do no 
murder/ " 

"O, but that man killed my father." 

"Our dear Lord himself says, 'If ye love me, 



THE PEOMISE OF FOKGIVENESS 23 



keep my commandments/ and this is one of 
them." 

"0," exclaimed the Greenlander, "I do love 
Jesus ! But I — I must " 

a Wait a little, calm yourself ; think it well over, 
and then come and let me know." 

He went out, but presently came back, saying, 
"I cannot decide; one moment I will, the next I 
will not. Help me to decide." 

The missionary answered, "When you say, T 
will kill him/ it is the evil spirit trying to gain 
the victory. When you say, 'I will not kill him/ 
it is the Spirit of God striving within you." 

And so, leading him gently along, the mission- 
ary led him to give up his murderous design. Ac- 
cordingly, the Greenlander sent a message to the 
murderer of his father, telling him to come and 
meet him as a friend. The man came with kind- 
ness on his lips but with treachery in his heart. 
After he had stayed with him a while he asked 
the young man to come and visit him on his side 
of the river. To this the young Christian readily 
assented; but on returning to his boat he found 
that it had been pierced by a cleverly concealed 
hole, his enemy hoping thereby to destroy him. 
He stopped the hole and put off in his boat, which, 
to the surprise and wrath of the other, who had 



24 THE GBEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

climbed a high rock to see him drown, did not 
sink, but merrily breasted the waves. Then the 
young man shouted aloud to his enemy, "I freely 
forgive you, for our dear Lord has forgiven me." 

Our forgiveness of others must be as thorough 
and genuine as we desire God's forgiveness to be 
toward us. Prince Bismarck was once requested 
by Count Enzenberg to write something in his 
album. The page on which he had to write con- 
tained the autographs of Guizot and Thiers. The 
former had written, "I have learned in my long 
life two rules of prudence. The first is, To for- 
give much ; the second is, Never to forget." Un- 
der this Thiers had written, "A little forgetting 
would not detract from the sincerity of the for- 
giveness." Prince Bismarck added, "As for me, 
I have learned to forget much and to ask to be 
forgiven much." 

Any man who proudly and stubbornly says, "I 
will never forgive," sets himself up to fight 
against God. No man ought ever to say he will 
not forgive another, no matter what the wrong 
has been, unless he is willing to forever go unfor- 
given of God. 

There are many people who are destroying all 
their happiness for this world and locking the 
doors of heaven against themselves in the world to 



THE PKOMISE OF FOEGIVENESS 25 



come, because their hearts are hard and unfor- 
giving. Many a man has stood at the very door 
of mercy, deeply convicted of sin, ready to enter 
into the open door and be saved, who has turned 
away again in sadness because he was not willing 
to forgive some one whom he thought had wronged 
him. You must forgive or be banished from 
heaven. What folly to allow this vile passion of 
hate to eat out your eternal peace ! 

There is an old classic story of a Spartan boy 
who, having stolen a fox, kept him under his 
coat, though the fox was gnawing his vitals and 
letting out his lifeblood. He submitted to it 
rather than expose his wrong deed. So there are 
many people proudly facing the world who have 
secret grudges and hatreds in their hearts which 
are gnawing away their very soul's hope. How 
infinitely wiser to forgive and to refuse to permit 
hatred to have a nesting place in the heart. Paul, 
in his letter to the Ephesians, earnestly says, "Let 
not the sun go down upon your wrath" — which 
might mean not only that we should not sin 
against God by cherishing hate, but also the 
wise philosophy that vengeance cherished will rob 
our hours of rest of their sweetness. The true 
Christian heart refuses to cherish hatred at all, 
and by forgiving at once not only maintains its 



26 THE GREAT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 



own peace but often conquers the one who has 
done the wrong deed. 

I have seen a story of an old colored woman 
who used to sell apples down in lower New York 
city. She was a most genuine Christian. One 
day she was going along the street with her basket 
of apples on her arm selling to whoever would buy. 
A rough sailor ran against her purposely and up- 
set the basket, and stood back expecting to hear 
her scold and curse him frightfully; but she 
stooped down and picked up the apples, and said, 
"God forgive you, my son, as I do." The sailor 
saw the meanness of his conduct, and pulled out a 
handful of silver and begged her to take it all. 
Though she was black, he called her mother, and 
said, "Forgive me, mother; I will never do any- 
thing so mean again." There is marvelous power 
in a forgiving spirit to pluck the sting out of 
wrath and spread abroad the heavenly atmosphere 
of love. 

The weighty message of this text is that every 
man sets his own standard. We are to be forgiven 
as we forgive. It is a solemn thought and one 
that may well give us pause. 

"When the phonograph first came into use Dr. 
Talmage talked into one in Baltimore. The 
cylinder containing the words was sent on to 



THE PEOMISE OF FORGIVENESS 27 



Washington, and the next day, from another pho- 
nographic instrument, that cylinder, when turned, 
gave back to his astonished ears the very words he 
had uttered the day before, and with the same in- 
tonations. He was awed by the reflection that if 
you scold into a phonograph it will scold back. 
Pour mild words into a phonograph and it will 
return the gentleness. So society and the world 
and the church are phonographs. If we are sour 
and rough with them we shall get back as much as 
we give. And not only from man, but from God, 
we shall get back what we give. If we forgive our 
fellow men, God will forgive us; but if we will 
not forgive, he will not forgive us. 

There is deep comfort in the certainty of the 
promise that if we do fulfill the conditions and 
forgive others God will forgive us. Nothing is 
stronger than this promise of Jesus, "Forgive, 
and ye shall be forgiven." The forgiveness of 
others, to which we are persuaded by a sense of 
our own unworthiness and our own need of for- 
giveness from God, is in itself a surrender to our 
heavenly Father, and that is essential to our sal- 
vation. Once after a great naval battle between 
the French and English fleets, in which the Eng- 
lish had been victorious and Lord Nelson had cap- 
tured a French officer, the Frenchman as he 



28 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

approached offered Lord Nelson his hand. Nel- 
son replied, "First give me your sword, and then 
give me your hand." We must yield up the 
sword of our pride and our stubborn will before 
we have a right to the hand that was nailed to 
Calvary's cross for our redemption. 

Thank God, when we are forgiven it is perma- 
nent. Our sin is blotted out forever. God de- 
clares that what he has forgiven shall be like that 
which is dropped overboard behind a man's back 
in the midst of the sea, that shall never be beheld 
again. One of the meanest things in the world is 
to pretend to forgive anyone for a wrong deed, 
and then, any time you get vexed with him, to 
twit him about it and bring it up to his attention. 
God will never do that. There is no meanness in 
the divine heart. If you have repented of your 
sins, and through faith in Jesus Christ, having a 
forgiving spirit yourself, have asked for God's 
forgiveness, then your sins are blotted out, and to 
go on worrying about them is to doubt God. I 
have no doubt there are some who hear me who 
from time to time are anxious and fretted for 
fear God does not forgive some special sin that 
seems unusually bad. That is a lack of faith in 
God. Trust him, in Jesus's name, and have 
peace. Your sins shall never haunt you again; 



THE PKOMISE OF FOEGIVENESS 29 



not even at the judgment day, when you stand 
before the great white throne, shall that sin bo 
brought to light, for Jesus Christ shall stand as 
your defender and show your record made white 
by the blood of the Lamb. 

Are there any here who are not forgiven, 
whose hearts are anxious and restless, whose 
hearts are bitter and sad % Then for you I have a 
message of hope. God is ready and willing to 
forgive you. If you have been cherishing a 
grudge against anyone, if you have been allowing 
bitterness to nest in your heart, put it out now. 
Determine here and now to put it all away, and 
at least on your part to let no unforgiving spirit 
remain. Then you will be on a basis to go before 
the mercy seat, O, how happy you might go 
away this evening if you would put all wrath and 
evil out of your soul, and, turning to God in the 
spirit of the prayer which Jesus taught us, seek 
the forgiveness of your sins ! He will forgive all 
of them. He will blot them all out and give you 
freedom and peace. 



30 THE, GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 



III 

The Promise of Sympathy 

We have not an high priest which cannot he touched 
with the feeling of our infirmities; hut was in all points 
tempted like as we are, yet without sin. — Hebrews iv, 15. 

The last part of this text explains the first. 
Christ is in sensitive touch with us in the tempta- 
tions and trials of life because he has personally 
experienced them. He is not a stranger, standing 
off on the ramparts of heaven, looking down, 
though it be ever so benevolently, upon sorrows 
and difficulties which he has never personally 
known. Such compassion could not mean much 
to us. But Jesus Christ perfected himself as the 
Captain of our salvation through suffering. For 
three and thirty years he wore our flesh and tasted 
our grief, and he is touched with the feeling of 
our infirmities. How much that ought to mean 
to us ! 

When we are in any trial or trouble and need 
comfort it is not the most joyous and happy, who 
have never known sorrow, to whom we go for 
sympathy. There was a woman whose little child 



THE PEOMISE OF SYMPATHY 



31 



very suddenly died in her arms. It was her only 
child, and the very idol of her heart. She was 
stunned by her grief. She could not even cry. 
The fountain of tears seemed to be frozen. She 
would not let anybody take the body of her child 
out of her arms. Her husband lovingly tried to 
comfort her, and sought to persuade her to give 
the child to him, but she would not. For hours 
she held the little body close to her breast, her face 
full of untold agony. At last the husband thought 
of a neighbor down the street who had lost a little 
child not long before, about the same age as their 
little one. He went to her and told her of the 
awful sorrow that had come to their home and 
the sad condition of his wife, and begged her to 
come and see if she would know how to comfort 
her. The woman came and quietly went in, and 
without a word sat down beside the poor grief- 
dazed mother, put her arm around her, her own 
tears rolling down over her cheeks, and kissed 
her, and simply said, "I know all about it, dear." 
The face of the mother softened in a moment. 
The refreshing tears came to her eyes ; her frozen 
heart melted in her bosom, and she held the body 
of the child out to her neighbor, and said, "I can 
give it to you. I could not give it to anyone else, 
for they did not know." 



32 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

So no one could be a Saviour for us who had not 
suffered. ~No one could have compassion on us in 
our weakness who had not himself been tempted 
and tried as by fire. Only a man who has been 
hungry, and has not known where to lay his head 
at times, knows how to sympathize perfectly with 
the man out of work and out of money. Only he 
who has been unpopular, and abused, and lonely, 
knows how to sympathize with others who are in 
similar experience. Only he who has been in the 
wilderness with the devil, tempted on every side, 
struggling for his life, knows how to sympathize 
and have true compassion with tempted men and 
women to-day. Only he who has been crowned 
with thorns, who has been spit upon and whipped 
with the scourge, who has fainted under his cross, 
knows real compassion, how to be touched with the 
feeling of people who are lashed by cruel mis- 
fortunes and who are fainting under burdens too 
heavy for their shoulders. But Jesus Christ 
meets all these requirements. He knows all 
about it. 

The incarnation of Jesus was no sham. He 
wore our humanity completely, and there never 
was a more perfectly sensitive human nature, one 
more tender and exquisite in human feelings, than 
that of Jesus Christ. As has been well said, 



THE PKOMISE OF SYMPATHY 33 

Christ affected none of that hard indifference in 
which some ancient philosophers vainly gloried. 
He felt as a man, and he sympathized with the 
feelings of others. On different occasions we are 
informed that he was troubled in spirit, that he 
groaned, and that he wept. The story of his 
agony in the garden of Gethsemane exhibits a 
striking picture of the sensations of innocent 
nature oppressed with anguish. It discovers all 
the conflict between the dread of suffering on the 
one hand and the sense of duty on the other; the 
man struggling for a while with human weakness 
and in the end rising superior and winning the vic- 
tory. We hear the Saviour say, "Father, if it be 
possible, let this cup pass from me." There is the 
dread of suffering natural on all our lips. But the 
next moment we hear Christ saying, "Neverthe- 
less, not as I will, but as thou wilt. Thy will be 
done." So our Saviour was touched with the 
feeling of our infirmities. He was a man of sor- 
rows, and acquainted with grief. His whole life 
was an experience of the ordinary trials and prov- 
ocations that lead to evil, and these were some- 
times aggravated into the most intense tempta- 
tions. He was made the target of all the arrows 
of Satan. But, though he was tempted in all 
points, he came off victorious and without sin. 
3 



34 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

These reflections bring ns to appreciate the fact 
that Christ is ideally perfect as a friend and 
Saviour for us in the weaknesses and infirmities 
with which our lives in this world are familiar. 
We may comfort ourselves with the assurance of 
several very inspiring reflections. 

First: Christ, being touched with the feeling 
of our infirmities, will make a distinction between 
what is weak and what is willfully wrong in us. 
J esus gives us a very beautiful illustration of this 
in his treatment of the disciples, those three close 
friends, Peter and James and John, whom he took 
with him into the garden of Gethsemane on the 
night of his betrayal. He said to them, as the 
burden of sorrow pressed upon him, "My soul is 
exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye 
here, and watch with me." And then he went 
away a little by himself and fell on his face in 
prayer, and after a time he came back, wishing 
the comfort of the association with his friends. 
And behold, they were all asleep. They aroused 
at his step, and Jesus said to Peter, "What ! could 
ye not watch with me one hour ? Watch and pray, 
that ye enter not into temptation." Then Jesus, 
in the tenderness of his great heart feeling sym- 
pathy and compassion toward them, begins to 
apologize for them and explain to them their weak- 



THE PEOMISE OF SYMPATHY 



35 



ness : "The spirit indeed is willing/' he says, "but 
the flesh is weak." Was there ever greater tender- 
ness % One can easily imagine the sarcasm of Na- 
poleon or Frederick the Great on such an occasion. 
But could anything more clearly illustrate the 
tenderness of Christ in distinguishing between 
our weakness and willful wrongdoing? We may 
be sure that Christ will never misjudge us. If we 
are doing the best we can he knows it and appre- 
ciates it to its full value. He sees every battle 
we make, even when we are defeated, and knows 
the motive behind every blow that is struck in his 
name. He will never reject or look with indiffer- 
ence or contempt on any effort we make to serve 
him because of infirmities which make us to blush. 
What we speak in words are not the only prayers 
Christ hears, but every secret aspiration and long- 
ing for goodness or for helpful service is a prayer 
which he hears and answers. There is no eloquence 
of human lips that can compare with the peniten- 
tial tears shed in secret, springing from sincere 
meditation upon our duty to God and heartfelt 
longing that we may render him truer service. 

Second: Jesus, knowing our infirmities, will 
not allow us to be burdened more heavily than we 
are able to bear. He will not allow us to be 
tempted in such a way that there is no escape for 



36 THE GEE AT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

us. He will not permit us to be loaded, unless we 
bring it on ourselves by our own sin, with unneces- 
sary troubles. His message about burdens is in- 
finitely tender : "Come unto me, all ye that labor 
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I 
am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest 
unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my 
burden is light." In regard to temptation, we 
have the direct promise that his grace shall be 
sufficient for us, and that in every temptation he 
will make a way for our escape, so that both in our 
sorrow and in our danger Christ, touched with the 
feeling of our infirmities, stands ready to comfort 
and defend us. We shall go through no path so 
lonely or uncertain but we may find marks to show 
us, if we really seek for them, that Christ has 
been over the way first. Alexander Maclaren re- 
calls the customs of pioneers in trackless lands, 
how when one friend passes through pathless 
forests he breaks a branch ever and anon as he 
goes, that those who come after may see the traces 
of his having been there, and may know that they 
have not lost the trail. So when we are journey- 
ing through the murky night and the dark woods 
of affliction and sorrow it is a precious thing to 
find here and there a broken branch or a leafy 



THE PROMISE OF SYMPATHY 37 



stem bent down with the tread of Christ's foot 
and the kindly thoughtfulness of his hand as he 
passed, to remember that the path he trod he has 
hallowed, to find lingering fragrances and hidden 
strength in the knowledge that he was tempted in 
all points like as we are, bearing grief for us, 
bearing grief with us, bearing grief like us. 

Third: As angels comforted Jesus in his sor- 
rows, so he will succor us in our trials and weak- 
nesses. How tenderly Jesus prayed for us before 
he offered himself upon the cross as an atonement 
for our sins ! In that tender prayer, in which he 
expressly stated that it was not only for his dis- 
ciples but for all who should believe on him 
through their words to the end of the world, and 
therefore includes us, the Saviour prays: "Now 
I am no more in the world, but these are in the 
world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, thine 
they were, and thou gavest them me. Keep 
them through thine own name. Sanctify them 
through thy truth. Keep them from the evil one ; 
that they may be where I am, and may behold the 
glory which thou hast given me." 

How tender Christ was to people in hard places 
during his earthly ministry! Recall his journey 
to visit Martha and Mary when their brother 
Lazarus was dead. Remember the kindness to the 



38 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

poor woman who touched his garments as the 
crowd pressed about him. In these and multitudes 
of other cases how conspicuous the tenderness and 
sensitive compassion of Jesus Christ in comfort- 
ing those who are tried and troubled. Surely 
there could be nothing more attractive to us, noth- 
ing which could more perfectly appeal to our con- 
fidence and to our faith than the character and 
the story of Jesus our Saviour as set forth in the 
Word of God. How can we help crying out with 
Oliver Wendell Holmes : 

"0 Love divine, that stooped to share 
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear! 
On thee we cast each earthborn care; 
We smile at pain while thou art near. 

"Though long the weary way we tread, 
And sorrow crown each lingering year, 
No path we shun, no darkness dread, 
Our hearts still whispering, 'Thou art near!' 

"When drooping pleasure turns to grief, 
And trembling faith is changed to fear, 
The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf, 
Shall softly tell us, 'Thou art near!' 

"On thee we fling our burdening woe, 
O Love divine, forever dear; 
Content to suffer while we know, 
Living and dying, thou art near!" 



THE PEOMISE OF ANSWEES TO PEAYEE 39 



IV 

The Peomise of Answees to Peayee 

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for 
another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent 
prayer of a righteous man availeth much. — James v, 16. 

Moee people believe in the efficacy of prayer 
than in any other one thing on the earth ; and yet 
we know less about it than we do about anything 
else concerning which there is large agreement. 
It is like electricity. Edison, who has had greater 
success in dealing with it than anyone else who 
has ever lived, recently said: "Electricity is as 
much a mystery to me now as when I first touched 
a telegrapher's key." If his life depended upon 
it, he could not tell you whether electricity is mere 
force, like gravitation, or is as material as granite. 
And if this wizard of our time was able to answer 
these questions for us, that mystery of all physi- 
cal mysteries, the nature of force and matter, 
would still remain to be solved. 

A recent writer puts pithily the statement that 
of all religions Christianity makes most of prayer 
because it makes most of the personality of God. 
The aims of other religions is to remove God to 



40 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

an infinite distance ; the aim of Christianity is to 
bring man nearer to his Maker. According to the 
Bible, the divinest attribute of God is not his 
power, but his love; not his sovereignty, but his 
fatherhood. 

Sincere prayer is love-making between the 
human soul and God. In the very nature of 
things it must be personal and informal in order 
to be in the highest sense prayer. Henry Ward 
Beecher once said humorously, but not irrever- 
ently, that he had "as soon go a-courting with his 
father's old love-letters as pray in another man's 
forms of supplication." His idea, of course, was 
that prayer is, above all things, a personal com- 
munion between an individual soul and God. And 
when we pray in public our prayers are only help- 
ful and spiritually inspiring when we forget the 
congregation as hearers and personally commune 
with our heavenly Father. 

Our text is very interesting in its suggestions 
as to the proper preparation of the heart to fit us 
for effectual prayer. "Confess your faults one to 
another" precedes the prayer which we shall make 
for our brethren. A tender, forgiving, humble, 
considerate spirit toward our fellow men properly 
attunes the heart for communion with God and 
for effectual prayer. 



THE PEOMISE OF ANSWEES TO PEAYEE 41 

The reason why there have been men of great 
intelligence and much knowledge who have been 
bitter disbelievers in prayer is because they failed 
at this very point of preparation of heart. Mar- 
coni's discovery of wireless telegraphy has already 
gone beyond the experimental stage, and while we 
yet speak of it with wonder, all civilized nations 
accept it as a certainty. We know that he is able 
to speak wireless telegraph messages from Great 
Britain or from America across three thousand 
miles of ocean. Many are beginning to discuss the 
possibility that his discovery may yet supersede 
all cables, telephones, and ordinary telegraph by 
wire. And yet, though this is the greatest wonder 
for a hundred years, it is, like most of the other 
wonders, very simple. His instruments set in 
motion certain waves in that ether which pervades 
and surrounds our globe. These waves, like the 
ripples in a pond when a stone is cast into it, 
spread in every direction, and when they reach 
any receiver, far or near, tuned to take them, they 
give their message to it. A receiver not tuned to 
the proper pitch, however, is useless; the subtle 
ether waves pass it by to give their message else- 
where. Thus a hundred messages may reach a 
tuned receiver with absolute certainty, while one 
wrongly tuned misses them all. 



42 THE GBEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

This physical wonder has its value as an illus- 
tration of communication between God and the 
human soul. Here is a man, well educated intel- 
lectually, strong and forceful on the physical side, 
yet he declares that the Bible is false and that it 
is impossible that God should have talked with 
Abraham, or Jacob, or Joseph, or David, or Eli- 
jah, or Jesus, or Paul. He will not believe that 
these men could have been divinely inspired of 
God to speak or write messages which a heavenly 
Father communicates for the good of his children. 
He will not believe that God spoke to Moses on 
Mount Sinai the ten great words of the Law. And 
why will he not believe % Purely and simply be- 
cause God has never spoken to him. He can hear 
the voice of his fellow man ; he can hear the music 
of the wind and the songs of birds ; but, listen as 
he will, he never hears the voice of God. Why 
does he not hear ? Because his receiver, his heart, 
is not attuned to receive a message from God. 
Let him come with the meekness of Moses, with 
the faith of Abraham, with the prostrate humility 
of Elijah, with the heart-broken confession of 
David, with the ready repentance of Paul, and his 
heart shall be so transformed and attuned that it 
shall be prepared to receive and register the mes- 
sage from heaven. 



THE PROMISE OF ANSWERS TO PRAYER 43 

I doubt not that some of you who listen to me 
have been troubled because the heavens have 
seemed silent to you, and though to some extent 
the putting forth of your heart to God in prayer 
has not been without its comfort and its satisfac- 
tion, yet you have missed the answering peace and 
assurance for which your soul longs. If such is 
the case, let us face the great truth, the solemn 
truth, that full and complete answers to prayer 
must all depend upon the receiver — that is, your 
own heart and mind. God is never dumb or 
deaf to the appeals of his children. There are no 
aristocrats among the children of God, who may 
receive answers while more humble ones are made 
to wait. "No, indeed ; though a woman be as poor 
and humble as the widow of Sarepta, though a 
man be of as little earthly account as Lazarus 
whose afflicted body the dogs licked at the gate 
of Dives, God listens for her prayer and for his 
appeal, and does not fail in answering food or an- 
swering angels to bring about their good. Do not 
fail of the full teaching of our illustration. Here 
is a Marconi instrument set up on Cape Cod wait- 
ing for messages, but it is out of tune. The mes- 
sages come over the waters, but it is silent and 
deaf, and receives nothing. Other instruments 
receive the message; but, work as he will, the 



44 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

operator gets no register from this receiver that is 
out of tune. So other people are having answers 
to prayer. You look upon their contented faces; 
you hear their words of confidence ; you feel their 
spirit of self-sacrificing fidelity to God, and you 
know that prayer to them is real and is charged 
with constant comfort and blessing. But your 
heart is cold, to you the prayer meeting is as noth- 
ing, and if you engage in secret prayer it is only 
as a duty. If you ask me where the trouble is I 
must answer, getting my answer from God's 
Word, that the trouble is with the spiritual re- 
ceiver — your own heart. Get your heart in tune, 
through repentance and confession of sin and 
faith in Jesus Christ as your Saviour, and the 
messages will come straight and clear and keep 
on coming every day. 

You remember that old temple where Hannah 
consecrated her little boy, Samuel, to be brought 
up under the care of the prophet Eli. The boy's 
heart was innocent; from his babyhood his soul 
had looked up confidingly into the face of God, and 
when Eli tells him that the Lord wants to speak 
to him, and the voice calls again, "Samuel, Sam- 
uel !" you see the little fellow as he stands up be- 
side his couch and answers sweet and clear and 
wondering, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant hear- 



THE PEOMISE OF ANSWEES TO P EATER 45 

eth." Let us see to it that our hearts are in tune 
to receive the message from God. 

Let us look carefully at this suggestion which 
James gives us as a method of preparation for 
effectual prayer. "Confess your faults one to an- 
other." James was the brother of our Lord, and 
a very outspoken, genuine man. This entire book 
of James is famous for the clear-cut, heart-search- 
ing way it has in dealing with the life people 
really live every day. And this suggestion means 
that if we are going to pray to God we must be 
frank and open-hearted and honest about our- 
selves. TVe must not go around hiding sins in 
our heart. That will at once put the heart out 
of tune, so that it can receive no message from 
heaven. Bishop Temple once said that the chief 
benefit of being ready to confess faults which our 
conscience urges us to confess is that we clear our 
own minds and strengthen our own wills. A 
concealed fault has the malignant power of in- 
fecting the whole character. The sin while it is 
concealed enters into all you think or do. It be- 
comes a part of yourself. You cannot say, as 
Paul did, "It is not I that did it, but sin that 
dwelleth in me." The very fact of your conceal- 
ing your sin makes it peculiarly your own. It is 
not your fault merely ; it is you. But the moment 



46 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

you confess your sin and renounce it, your heart 
becomes honest before God and man. You may 
have a long struggle yet in getting rid of it, but 
you get the poison out of your blood and you 
henceforth carry an honest heart in your breast. 

It is not only true that a sin hidden in the soul 
poisons your life ; it becomes also a heavy burden 
on your heart. You have a sense of shame for hav- 
ing hidden it, and you come to despise yourself in 
the midst of praise that you may win from others. 
You may make all the pledges and resolutions you 
please, so long as you are hiding sin in your heart, 
and they will be weak and wavering. But a con- 
fession of sin which renounces it and turns from it 
forever, with a whole-hearted consecration to God, 
casts off its burden upon Him who careth for the 
sinner. 

We need to keep in mind that this is not only 
confession toward God, but living humbly toward 
our fellow men. If we live proudly and arrogant- 
ly toward them, we have not a fit heart to pray 
God for them. The self-righteous Pharisee who 
stands and thanks God that he is not like the poor 
publican is in no fit mood to pray for the poor 
publican or for himself. But that poor publican 
who smites upon his breast and cries, "God be 
merciful to me a sinner !" has by that very attitude 



THE PROMISE OF ANSWERS TO PRAYER 47 

of his soul brought himself not only into sympathy 
with God, but also into sympathy with his fellow 
men. 

There is nothing sweeter about a life of prayer 
than the privilege of praying for others. ISTo 
Christian ever receives a higher compliment, nor 
one that makes him more truly humble, than when 
one who has known his manner of living by daily 
contact comes and asks him in deep sincerity to 
intercede for him or her at the throne of grace. 
Dr. Torrey tells about a little girl of fourteen 
years who came into one of his meetings in Aus- 
tralia. Entering the inquiry room just as the 
workers were leaving, she stepped up timidly to a 
Christian woman who had been talking with in- 
quirers and said, "Please, ma'am, I was told to 

ask to see Mrs. . My friend said she knew 

Jesus so well." Do you know Jesus so well that 
anyone full of soul-hunger and longing to know 
the Saviour's pardoning love would think of you 
in that way ? 

One other thought. The direct promise in this 
last phrase of our text. "The effectual fervent 
prayer of a righteous man availeth much." If 
James had left it just there who, after all, would 
be able to get comfort out of that scripture ? 
Who would feel like standing up and saying be- 



48 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

fore God that lie is a perfectly righteous man ? 
Who, conscious of the infirmity and weakness of 
the flesh, conscious of his proneness to evil, would 
feel justified in making that claim? But James 
in the next verse illustrates what he means. He 
says that "Elijah was a man subject to like pas- 
sions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it 
might not rain : and it rained not on the earth by 
the space of three years and six months. And he 
prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the 
earth brought forth her fruit." Now, Elijah was 
a man, as James says, with many weaknesses and 
imperfections ; but at heart he was righteous. The 
dominant purpose of his soul was to do the will 
of God and to bless his fellow man. This made 
him powerful with God in prayer, and if we live 
in the same spirit and purpose we may be a great 
blessing to our fellows by praying for them. 

Surely I do not need to pile up illustrations or 
incidents to prove that God hears prayer. If you 
could speak out there would come from almost 
every pew in the church reminiscences tender and 
sweet and holy that would tell how amid the sins 
and sorrows and struggles of your life, often when 
broken and defeated in your own strength, your 
humility and sense of weakness have attuned your 
souls to hear the whispered messages from heaven. 



THE PROMISE OF ANSWERS TO PRAYER 49 

Thank God, the way is still open. The spiritual 
laws by which the patriarchs and the prophets, the 
apostles and the martyrs, and our own fathers and 
mothers talked with God are the same yesterday 
and to-day and forever. God give us wisdom that 
we may live prayerful lives, thus walking in the 
strength of Heaven and obtaining blessings for all 
about us ! 
4 



50 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



V 

The Peomise of Peace 

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is 
stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee. — Isaiah 
xxvi, 3. 

This is a very beautiful promise, and the es- 
sence of it is in that word "stayed." It suggests 
a humble alertness to the will of God, a watchful- 
ness that hearkens to God's command and holds 
itself steady by constant reliance upon the good- 
ness of God. Humility and confidence in God — 
there is the secret of peace. 

An English missionary in Africa tells a story 
of "God and the Animals" which African mothers 
repeat to their children. The story is that once 
upon a time the animals had no water to drink. 
So an assembly of representatives of the various 
species was called, and they held a consultation. 

Then the Elephant said, "We have food in 
abundance, but God has neglected to give us even 
a single well of water whereat we may quench our 
thirst. Come, let us go together to God and beg 
for water, lest we perish for lack of it." 



THE PEOMISE OF PEACE 



51 



To this all agreed, and they arose and com- 
menced their journey up the steep mountain track 
which led to the dwelling place of God. 

After proceeding a short distance they heard 
footsteps coming behind them. Looking back, 
they saw the Tortoise hurrying after them. 

"Stay," said the Buffalo; "let us wait until he 
comes up to us, and then give him a sound thrash- 
ing for his impudence in seeking to associate him- 
self with us." 

Presently the Tortoise came up, fearing no 
evil. 

"Good day, friends," said he; "will you allow 
me to join your deputation, and put in a plea for 
water on behalf of my tribe ? For sorely, indeed, 
do we need it." 

"What impudence !" said the Leopard, striking 
a blow at the Tortoise's head, which he cleverly 
avoided by withdrawing into his shell, "to venture 
to place himself on an equality with us !" 

So saying, he picked up the inoffensive Tortoise 
and flung him into a thorn bush; and the caval- 
cade proceeded on their journey. 

Soon recovering himself, the Tortoise picked 
his way out of the thorn bush and followed in the 
track of the other animals, keeping, however, at 
a distance for fear of further ill-treatment. 



52 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



At length the animals stood in the presence of 
God, and they cried out, saying, "O God, we are 
dying with thirst; give ns water, we heseech 
thee." 

And God said, "Go your way, pull up the acacia 
tree, and you shall find water at its roots.' 7 

So they departed. And when they had gone, 
the Tortoise, which had kept out of sight while 
the other animals were speaking with God, came 
forward, and God said, "What do you want here, 
Tortoise ?" 

And he said, "I have come to heg water for my 
tribe, lest we perish with thirst." 

And God replied, "Have I not already told your 
companions to dig at the root of an acacia tree 
and they will find water V 9 

So the Tortoise arose and went his way. 

Now, on their way down the mountain the other 
animals had all forgotten the name of the tree 
which God had told them to pull up. When they 
reached the plain their friends gathered around 
to learn how they had fared. 

"God has told us," said the Buffalo, "to pull up 
a certain tree, and we shall find water at its root. 
Come, friend Elephant, you are stronger than any 
of us ; you shall pull up the tree for us. It was the 
fig tree, was it not, that we were told ?" 



THE PEOMISE OF PEACE 



53 



"No," said the Elephant, "it was the plantain." 

"No, no," came from a dozen voices at once, 
and each animal had a different tree to suggest. 

"Well," said the Elephant, "it is no use argu- 
ing. I will pull them all up, and then we are 
sure to find the water." 

His labor, however, was all in vain ; not a drop 
of water could be found. Then the representatives 
of the various species began to quarrel, each 
blaming the other for having forgotten the name 
of the tree which would save them all from 
perishing. 

As the turmoil was getting noiser, and threat- 
ening to end in a general fight, the Tortoise came 
up, and, learning the cause of the disturbance, 
said, "Let me point out the tree for you. Come, 
friend Elephant, pull up the acacia tree." 

The animals all laughed at this, and the Ele- 
phant replied, "Do you suppose, Tortoise, that 
you know better than all of us ? Has not your 
experience in the thorn bush taught you wisdom ? 
Be off, or a worse fate will be yours, you 
audacious reptile." 

"Nay," meekly replied the Tortoise, "just pull 
up this one tree as I ask you, and if you do not 
find water at its roots kill me at once, as a creature 
which is, indeed, no longer fit to live." 



54 THE GREAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

So the Elephant consented, and pulled up the 
acacia tree ; and there, rapidly rising in the hollow 
that was made, was seen a bubbling spring of 
crystal water. Then all the animals sang the 
praises of the Tortoise, as they slaked their burn- 
ing thirst; and ever after he was highly esteemed 
by great and small. 

That simple little story has in it a vein of 
eternal truth. The secrets of life are not to be 
found in the great books nor by digging at com- 
plex problems; they cannot- be purchased for gold 
nor dug out of the wisdom of the sages. No, life's 
greatest secret is a plain, simple, open lesson that 
a wayfaring man though a fool need not err in as 
he runs. The great secret of peace is in humble 
reliance upon God — the simple life that does 
God's will; as our text states it, a Thou wilt keep 
him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on 
thee." 

There are several reasons why this is true. 
Eirst, because the man whose mind is stayed on 
God does not fear the result of past sins. He 
knows that his sins are forgiven. Sin is the great 
destroyer of peace. Archbishop Leighton said, 
"So much sin as gets in, so much peace will go 
out." One of the greatest causes of unrest and 
lack of peace is the consciousness of sin and the 



THE PEOMISE OF PEACE 



55 



fear of results that will be disastrous. A very 
striking thing is said by one of the writers of the 
Old Testament in describing the good man — "He 
shall not be afraid of evil tidings." How many 
people there are who never pass a day or a night 
without fear of evil tidings. Many people live in 
such a network of falsehood or of insincere con- 
duct, have so many deeds that they would not dare 
have brought to light, that they are forever afraid 
something will go wrong, and they live shuddering 
and unhappy lives because of it. There can be no 
peace to a soul like that. The author of our text 
says again in another place : "The wicked are like 
the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose 
waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, 
saith my God, to the wicked." But the heart that 
trusts God through Jesus Christ for the forgive- 
ness of sins enters into peace. There is no longer 
fear, since the mind is stayed upon God. 

In the second place, the heart that is stayed 
upon God has peace because there is no fear of 
earthly misfortune. Changes may come, but the 
mind stayed on God rests in this, that God is a 
Father. He has infinite power and wisdom and 
love. He will not permit any misfortune to come 
to the child that loves him and trusts him and 
obeys him. Any trial or loss that seems like a 



56 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

misfortune cannot really be one. It must be a 
blessing in disguise. And so we see multitudes 
of people who, in tbe midst of what to others 
would be soul-racking sorrows, maintain perfect 
peace and cheerfulness. The secret is open and 
simple. They trust God, and fear not. 

A third reason for the peace which comes to the 
mind which is stayed upon God is that there is no 
fear of trials which shall be too great. God has 
promised that to those who trust him no trial shall 
come greater than they are able to bear. Much of 
the lack of peace which comes to those who with 
more or less earnestness are endeavoring to live 
the Christian life is because they do not steady 
their hearts on this promise of God. They look 
abroad and see certain happenings to other people 
which they feel if they were to come to them they 
could not bear up under, and so they begin to fore- 
bode and to dread and to be anxious instead of 
relying upon God to keep his word. Steady your 
soul on God and such fears will not trouble you. 

In the fourth place, the soul that steadies itself 
on God does not fear death nor the future. To 
such a one death is only the messenger who comes 
to open the door into immortality. God who has 
been good to us in this world may be trusted to be 
good to us in the world to come. The fear of 



THE PEOMISE OF PEACE 



57 



death is a great source of unrest. Many people 
will not go to a funeral, will not permit themselves 
to drive past a cemetery if they know it, and will 
not allow anyone to talk of death in their pres- 
ence. Nothing can be more foolish. How in- 
finitely better it is to give our hearts in perfect 
surrender and confidence to our heavenly Father, 
to live day by day in harmony with his will, keep 
his commandments, and prayerfully do what he 
asks us to do, so that death can only bring us the 
more perfectly into his presence. We cannot es- 
cape death by refusing to speak the word. Death 
is just as much a part of human life as is birth. 
The only way to treat death sensibly and reason- 
ably is to master it and enter into possession of it 
and make it one of our treasures. Paul speaks of 
it in that way when he says : "All things are 
yours ; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the 
world, or life, or death, or things present, or 
things to come ; all are yours ; and ye are Christ's ; 
and Christ is God's." You cannot for a moment 
comprehend a man's being tormented and dis- 
tressed by fear of death, and what may come after 
death, whose mind is stayed upon God in a faith 
like that. 

Men make a bad bargain when they exchange 
their peace for any bribe which the world, the 



58 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OE THE BIBLE 

flesh, or tlie devil has to offer. What folly it is 
to trade peace for pleasure. Pleasure is the froth 
at the top of the glass. Peace is the elixir of life. 
Dives, about whom Jesus tells us, had pleasure. 
He lived in a fine house and fared sumptuously 
every day. We might imagine from the details of 
the story that he kept a large pack of hunting 
dogs and was a sporting man. But though he had 
a great deal of pleasure he had no peace. INow, 
Lazarus, on the other hand, had no pleasures. It 
was no pleasure to lie down at the gate full of 
sores and receive the pittance doled out to him by 
charity. It was no pleasure to see the con- 
temptuous looks that Dives cast at him, the man 
who refused him even the crumbs that fell from 
his table. But in spite of the lack of pleasure, 
Lazarus was much the happier man of the two, 
for he had peace. He was a good man ; there was 
no remorse to haunt him with sins unforgiven. 
His conscience was void of offense toward Grod 
and man. He was poor, pitifully poor, so poor 
that the ordinary pleasures of life were impos- 
sible ; but the peace of God was in his heart. And 
when the brief span of life was over, and the mes- 
senger of death came about the same time for both 
Dives and Lazarus, then was revealed the vast 
superiority of peace over pleasure. Dives's pleas- 



THE PEOMISE OF PEACE 



59 



ures were all of this world, and when they were 
gone his sins claimed their wages. He found him- 
self among the torments of those whose sins drive 
them from the presence of God. In the far off 
he sees Lazarus, and to his astonishment the poor 
old beggar has found his youth and his joy. He 
is in intimate association with men like Abraham. 
But the gulf between them is impossible to be 
crossed. 

My dear friend, which will you have, pleasure 
or peace ? The devil is constantly promising those 
who give themselves to sin that they shall have 
pleasure; but the pleasures of sin are only the 
scaffolding within which Satan builds an evil 
habit, and when once that habit has fastened itself 
upon you the scaffolding of pleasure will be taken 
down, but the vampire of sin will remain. On the 
other hand, the peace which comes to a heart 
stayed upon God is a beautiful thing that grows 
more satisfying as the years go on. It is sweet 
amid childhood's innocence, more beautiful still 
amid the vigor of girlhood or boyhood, increases 
in strength and fragrance in young manhood or 
young womanhood ; in mature life is like the cur- 
rent of a mighty river shining in the sun, and is 
the one thing that can redeem old age from all its 
terrors. Old age, shrinking, timid, afraid, about 



60 THE GREAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

to take a leap into the dark, is a terrible thing; 
but old age, strong-hearted, cherishing happy 
memories, full of prayer and thanksgiving, look- 
ing toward the future with eyes like Paul's, cry- 
ing out in exultation, "I have fought a good fight, 
I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: 
henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of 
righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous 
Judge, shall give me at that day!" — an old age 
like that is glorious beyond all the power of words 
to describe. Such an old age is within the reach 
of every one of us who will hearken to the message 
of our text and with all our will-power center our 
thoughts and purposes and plans upon God. 



THE PROMISE OF FRIENDSHIP 



61 



VI 

The Promise of Friendship 

Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command 
you. — John xv, 14. 

Dr. H. Ceay Trumbull, who has written a 
beautiful book entitled Friendship the Master- 
Passion, defines friendship as being love for an- 
other because of what that other is in himself, or 
for that other's sake, and not because of what that 
other is to the loving one. According to this ex- 
pert, friendship is love with the selfish element 
eliminated. It is an outgoing and an ongoing 
affection, wholly and inherently disinterested, and 
in no sense contingent upon any reciprocal rela- 
tion between its giver and its object, nor yet upon 
its return or recognition. Friendship, in short, is 
love apart from love's claim or love's craving. 
This is pure friendship, friendship without alloy. 
This is friendship at its truest and best; and this 
it is that makes the best and truest friendship so 
rare, so difficult of conception, so liable to miscon- 
ception. 

According to this writer, in all holiest and most 



62 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

unselfish love friendship is the purest element of 
the affection. No love in any relation of life can 
be at its best if the element of friendship be lack- 
ing, and no love can transcend, in its possibilities 
of noble and ennobling exaltation, a love that is 
pure friendship. 

In order that we may get the full comfort pro- 
vided for us in this promise of the friendship of 
Jesus Christ, it is necessary for us to consider the 
possibilities of friendship. One of the charac- 
teristics of friendship is that it consists in loving 
rather than in being loved. How beautifully 
Whittier puts it : 

"Love is sweet in any guise; 
But its best is sacrifice. 

"He who giving does not crave, 
Likest is to Him who gave 
Life itself the loved to save." 

Moses brings out the same thought when in 
telling of God's love toward Israel he says : "The 
Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, 
because ye were more in number than any people ; 
for ye were the fewest of all people: but because 
the Lord loved you." And that same disposition 
to love a friend, even when the returns are very 
poor, is an attribute of the strongest and best men 



THE PEOMISE OF FRIENDSHIP 



63 



and women. When General Grant was President 
of the United States his administration was 
brought to the verge of ruin because of friends 
whom he had trusted but who had proved un- 
worthy. When asked by some one why he would 
stand by his friend when he was wrong, the great 
man quietly said that that was when his friend 
most needed him. 

If we apply this thought to the friendship of 
Jesus it is very comforting to every Christian. 
Jesus saw something in us that he wished to make 
friends with. We did not choose him, he chose 
us. First of all, he proved his friendship by giv- 
ing his life for us, and Christ himself says that no 
man can have greater love than that. But he has 
chosen us, and called us personally to be his 
friends, and he loves us, not because we are perfect, 
for we are not; he loves us, and he is seeking to 
bring us, because of that love, into perfect fellow- 
ship with himself. 

True friendship is entirely unselfish. The 
friend loves his friend, and longs to bring to him 
blessing, without thought of the result to himself. 
One of the most remarkable illustrations of this 
unselfish character of friendship is seen in the 
beautiful story of David and Jonathan. When 
David came to the headquarters of Saul's army a 



64 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

comparatively unknown shepherd lad, and by his 
heroism proved himself the greatest man in Israel, 
Jonathan gave his heart to him. Now, Jonathan 
was the crown prince of the realm. He was the 
heir apparent to his father's throne. The growing 
popularity of David, the applause which he was 
winning as a hero, could not hut in the very nature 
of things be a threat against Jonathan's coming to 
his rightful place as king. No one could have 
known this better than Jonathan himself. But 
the noble young fellow refused to allow jealousy 
or envy or selfishness to have anything to do with 
his feeling toward David. He loved David. Jona- 
than himself was a hero, a brave and daring spirit 
who had proved his heroic qualities on many a 
battlefield ; but he felt that in David he had found 
his master. In him was everything he loved and 
admired and adored in a young man, and so he 
gave him his love and his friendship. 

The shepherd lad, though he has slain Goliath 
and is the talk of the army, has no clothes proper 
for a young officer or weapons befitting the new 
position to which Saul has raised him. Jonathan 
cannot bear to have him humiliated, so what does 
he do ? Do ? Why, he plays the friend's part — 
takes him into his own tent, brings out his best 
uniform, makes David wear it; takes his own 



THE PEOMISE OF EKIENDSHIP 



65 



sword, the one thing he cares more for than any- 
thing in the world, and hangs it at David's side. 
And in the days that followed he was true to 
David. He even risked his own life in incurring 
the wrath of the king in order to save David. He 
was entirely unselfish in all this. There never 
was a time while Jonathan lived that David was 
able to give him back anything except his affec- 
tion. But Jonathan was not working for what 
David could do for him, but for what he could do 
for David. 

Take this beautiful story and apply it to the 
friendship of the Lord Jesus Christ for those who 
give themselves to him in obedient love. He will 
clothe us from his own wardrobe. He will cleanse 
us by his forgiving love and array us in the graces 
of his own beautiful character. He will give us 
the same armor with which he contended against 
all the temptations and trials of human life and 
came off conqueror. He will give us the same 
sword which he wore — the sword of the Spirit. 
He will be with us in every struggle, and we shall 
never win a victory but his shall be the most in- 
spiring cheer that falls upon our ears. He will 
never be jealous of us. He will never envy us, 
and every victory will please him more than it 
pleases us. 
5 



66 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

History is full of illustrations of the power of 
a genuine friendship to develop in a man or a 
woman the very best possibilities. Men who have 
been but commonplace have become heroes under 
the touch of a noble friendship. During the civil 
war in America there are many cases recorded 
where a friend slipped into the place of a soldier 
condemned to die, or who was to take a great risk, 
heroically taking the friend's doom or danger 
upon himself. 

Charles Dickens never painted a more inspir- 
ing picture than the illustration of this power of 
friendship to make a hero out of ordinary ma- 
terial. He tells us the story of Sidney Carton, 
who lived an aimless, useless life, wasting all his 
opportunities and powers, until he was aroused 
to a sense of something better and holier by a sen- 
timent of purest friendship for Lucie Manette. 
It was no craving love, no love with the hope or 
expectation of possession, that developed, en- 
larged, and ennobled the soul of Sidney Carton 
as it went out toward Lucie Manette in an un- 
selfish friendship for her. This friendship was 
born of what she was in herself, and not because 
of what she was or ever could be to him. It was a 
love that included all whom she loved for her sake, 
and it steadily transformed Sidney Carton into a 



THE PROMISE OF FRIENDSHIP 67 



higher personality. The time came when Charles 
Darnay, the husband of Lucie Manette, was sen- 
tenced to the guillotine during the Reign of 
Terror in the French Revolution. Then it was 
that Sidney Carton managed to enter the cell of 
the condemned man, and to exchange places with 
him, sending him out to rejoin his wife and child 
in liberty, all unconscious of the cost of his es- 
cape, Carton going in his stead to the deadly 
block. And as this hero-friend passed along the 
streets to his execution he was ministering re- 
ligious comfort, in the spirit of self-forgetful 
friendship, to a gentle girl who was his fellow 
sufferer ; and his last words to her were the assur- 
ing words of the Friend of friends: "I am the 
resurrection, and the life : he that believeth in me, 
though he were dead, yet shall he live: and who- 
soever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." 
The people who looked on as he went to death 
said of him that it was "the peacefulest man's 
face" ever beheld there. 

If we apply this characteristic of friendship to 
the promised friendship of Jesus for us we shall 
find in it great blessing and comfort. If we are 
the friends of Jesus and give him full sway to 
awake in our hearts this master passion, it will 
develop in us everything that is noble and splendid 



68 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

and sublime. 0, the inspiring power of friend- 
ship for Jesus Christ to transform men and 
women! It has taken a useless drunkard and 
made him into a prince of orators like John B. 
Gough or John G. Woolley. It has taken a blas- 
phemous ruffian and changed him into a classic 
writer like John Bunyan. It has taken a bigoted, 
cruel persecutor and transformed him into an un- 
selfish and gentle-hearted missionary like the 
apostle Paul. It has taken a poor jail bird and 
river thief and made him over into the soul-win- 
ner, Jerry McAuley. And, to use the words of the 
writer of the book of Hebrews, "time would fail 
us" to call over the famous names of history, in 
the pulpit, among singers of the gospel, among 
statesmen and soldiers, who out of wickedness and 
depravity have been lifted, inspired, glorified by 
the supreme touch of friendship for Christ that 
has made them willing, yes, gladly willing, to risk 
their lives that they might show their friendship 
for their divine Lord. The possibility of heroic 
living is in every one of us, and the best way to 
bring it out is to give ourselves unfalteringly to a 
whole-hearted friendship for Jesus. 

One other characteristic of a true friendship, 
only, can we notice, and that is that it is change- 
less amid all the changes of life, A passionate 



THE PROMISE OF FRIENDSHIP 69 

love is often a consuming flame that soon burns 
itself out. Any sort of relation that requires give 
and take, any relation in which we are seeking to 
get back as much as we give, is liable to be only 
temporary. But a sincere and genuine friend- 
ship, which is built not on what we can get, but 
on what we can give, will never die. 

We were talking but just now of Jonathan's 
beautiful exhibition of friendship for David. But 
there is another story, a sequel to that, which 
shows us that David was worthy of that beautiful 
love. After Saul and Jonathan were slain, and 
David came to be king, he did not content himself 
by doing honor to J onathan's memory, by writing 
a beautiful poem about him, declaring that Jona- 
than's love for him surpassed even the love of 
women ; no, David went further than that to show 
his friendship for Jonathan. He made diligent 
inquiry to find if any of Jonathan's children were 
yet alive, and he found that there was one, a poor 
crippled fellow. When he was a baby, a nurse, 
running with him to save his life, dropped him, 
and he was crippled ever afterward. This poor 
fellow, whose name was Mephibosheth, and his 
family — for he was now a grown man — were liv- 
ing in trembling retirement, hiding to escape pub- 
lic notice, fearing that after the hard manner of 



70 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

the times they might be put to death as claimants 
of the throne. David at once sent and had them 
brought, gave them rooms in his palace, had them 
eat at his own table, and declared that for Jona- 
than's sake they should always dwell in the king's 
household. 

We might spiritualize this in either of two 
ways. We might make it suggestive as to the 
treatment our King will give us in feeding us at 
his own table on the Bread of Life. But there is a 
natural suggestion which ought to be inspiring to 
us that comes from the other side. David was 
kind to Jonathan's son because Jonathan had 
risked his own life for David. Christ has given 
his life for us. Has he anyone left behind whom 
he loves, to whom by showing kindness we may at 
the same time show our friendship for Jesus 
Christ ? Yes, indeed ; he himself has said that what- 
ever we shall do to feed the hungry, or clothe the 
naked, or visit the prisoner, or minister to the 
sick, among his brethren and sisters who are in 
trouble, though they be the most insignificant, so 
that they are counted the very least among the 
citizens of the town, he will regard it tenderly, 
and in the last great day of days will say, "Inas- 
much as ye have done it unto one of the least of 
these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." 



THE PKOMISE OF HOPE 



71 



VII 

The Peomise of Hope 

The hope of the righteous shall be gladness. — 
Proverbs x, 28. 

Hope has been called the sunshine of the mind. 
Like the old sundial of Saint Mark's in Venice, 
it marks only the cloudless hours. It leads life 
onward and buoys it with courage and strength. 
Thackeray calls hope "the nerve of life," and it is 
not a bad definition. God is called "the God of 
hope" because in his perfect strength and wisdom 
he is never cast down or depressed, but ever full 
of the sunshine and courage of certain victory. 
True hope is not a thing depending upon outward 
circumstances. It is a creature of the soul. It is 
born within, and it is only the blossoming, the 
result, which we see in the outer life. Our text 
suggests that. The wise man wrote, a The hope of 
the righteous shall be gladness." And the reason 
is because his hope is founded on his righteous- 
ness. A man does right. He does his duty to 
God. He pleases God, and his hope is founded 
upon the promises of God to sustain and keep and 
bring him to final victory. 



72 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

The most powerful factor for good in this world 
is Christian hope. Paul, in his letter to the Colos- 
sians, gives a suggestion of the reason for this 
when he says, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." 
Paul's thought was that in answer to our opening 
the door of the heart Christ comes and dwells in 
the heart, in our thoughts, in our imaginations, in 
our purposes, in all our sympathies, and there is 
horn in the soul a hope of glory through our fel- 
lowship and kinship with Jesus Christ. And if 
we shall give ourselves up completely to that hope 
it will come to possess us so perfectly that all 
doubt and fear will he crowded out. 

There is a legend of a man whose garden pro- 
duced nothing hut weeds, till at last he met with a 
strange foreign flower of singular vitality. The 
story is that he sowed a handful of this seed in 
his overgrown garden and left it to work its own 
sweet way. He slept, and rose, and knew not how 
the seed was growing, till, on a certain day, he 
opened the gate, and saw a sight which much 
astounded him. He knew that the seed would 
produce a dainty flower, and he looked for it ; but 
he had little dreamed that the plant would cover 
the whole garden. So it was ; the flower had ex- 
terminated every weed, till, as he looked from one 
end to the other, from wall to wall, he could see 



THE PKOMISE OF HOPE 



73 



nothing but the fair colors of that rare plant and 
smell nothing but its delicious perfume. The 
hope of glory through Jesus Christ will be like 
that plant. If you will but give Jesus the right 
of way in your heart, he will fill all the soil and 
crowd out every noxious weed of selfishness and 
choke to the death every sinful temper. 

These two scriptures — our text, which declares 
that "the hope of the righteous shall be gladness," 
and the words of Paul, which speak of "Christ in 
you, the hope of glory" — fit together beautifully. 
They teach us that gladness is the flower of hope. 
Hope is the bulb and gladness is the blossom. 
Christ in our hearts is the certain germ which 
causes hope to send forth its sprouts into the upper 
air of our everyday life. If you ask me how you 
can take Christ into your heart, I answer, "By 
faith and obedience." Trust him, obey him, keep 
his commandments, and he will come and dwell 
in your heart till you shall care more to please 
him than anyone else in the world. And when- 
ever that fact exists the hope of glory gladdens 
the soul and fills the life with its perfume. 

David Hume, the English historian and noted 
enemy of the Christian faith, once overheard his 
servant-man John repeating the text, "Christ in 
you, the hope of glory." "You know that's all 



74 THE GREAT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 

nonsense/' said Hume; "I wonder that a sensible 
man like you can believe it. If Christ be in 
heaven, as you say, how can he be in you? He 
can't be in two places at one time. And then to 
be 'in you,' I don't understand it." 

"David Hume," said John, "you wrote the His- 
tory of England, and I read it page by page with 
great delight. You say in that history that the 
one redeeming feature in the life of 'Bloody Mary' 
was that when she was dying the news came to her 
that Calais had been captured and that on that 
occasion she raised herself up in bed and said to 
her maids of honor, 'When I die, take out my 
heart, and you will find "Calais" written on it.' 
Now, what more Calais written on Mary's heart 
than Christ on mine? Take out my heart, and 
you will find Christ written on it." 

Is that true of you ? Is Christ dwelling in your 
soul, the hope of glory ? 

The Christian's hope is gladness even in the 
midst of temptation and trial and hard experience. 
Hope is not only the nerve of life, but it is a great 
protection. In his letter to the Ephesians Paul 
calls hope a helmet. He says to these Christian 
friends that they should put on "the breastplate 
of righteousness, take the shield of faith, and for 
an helmet the hope of salvation." The helmet 



THE PROMISE OF HOPE 



75 



was a very important part of the old armor. 
Goliath lost his life because he was careless about 
his helmet. David was such a little fellow, and 
the sling seemed such a useless weapon against a 
giant, that the big brute thought he did not need 
to look out for his helmet, and the smooth stone 
of the brook, slung with the force of the muscle of 
the shepherd boy's arm, struck him straight in 
the middle of the forehead, where his helmet 
should have protected him. So the helmet is an 
important feature of Christian armor. A wound 
in the head is a serious thing for a Christian. 
Some people make the mistake of thinking they 
can afford to read all kinds of books, see all sorts 
of pictures, go into all kinds of questionable as- 
sociations, intellectually, without harm. There 
never was greater folly. God gives us our heads 
to use, not to idle with. But many men and 
women who sneer at the silly people who hang 
around the street corners loafing and simpering 
and giggling, like idle human geese, go themselves 
mooning about after all sorts of curiosities and 
seances, idling with their brains. It is a far more 
serious thing, too, for a man to go loafing with his 
brains than with his feet. But if we keep on as a 
helmet the "hope of salvation" through Jesus 
Christ, we shall have plenty to do and plenty to 



76 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

think about to protect us against all the on- 
slaughts of the enemy. 

The head is in danger, too, of assaults in the 
way of mental depression. Life is a struggle, and 
in all struggles there will be times when it will 
take all the energy we have to overcome. The 
Christian will be tempted to feel that the odds are 
greatly against him, and that he is certain to be 
defeated. His protection in such an hour lies in 
his hope in God. That must be his helmet, 
David, in the forty-second psalm, gives us a beau- 
tiful illustration of how that works. He was in 
one of the darkest places of his life and had been 
sneered at as one forgotten of heaven. He ex- 
claimed: "My tears have been my meat day and 
night, while they continually say unto me, Where 
is thy God ? When I remember these things, I 
pour out my soul in me : for I had gone with the 
multitude, I went with them to the house of God, 
with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude 
that kept holyday. Why art thou cast down, O 
my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? 
hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for 
the help of his countenance." 

The hope of the righteous is gladness because it 
gives steadiness and assurance to the Christian, 
both for this world and the world to come. The 



THE PROMISE OF HOPE 



77 



author of the book of Hebrews puts this in the 
strongest possible figure when he says, "Which 
hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure 
and steadfast, and which entereth into that within 
the veil." 

There is nothing that will so steady a life and 
give gladness because of a sense of rest and con- 
fidence as the Christian hope. Sir Humphry 
Davy, a brilliant man of science of the eighteenth 
century, with almost everything that the world 
could give to make a man happy, once wrote to a 
friend, "There is but one person I envy upon 
earth, and that is the man who has a clear and 
fixed religious belief." He felt that he was "all 
at sea," without a rudder and without an anchor. 
How different the case with Professor Maury, 
who wrote among other great books one on The 
Physical Geography of the Sea. He was a devout 
and humble Christian. In his youth he was a 
midshipman on a man-of-war, and long years 
after, in his dying hour, the scenes of early days 
came back. He fancied himself in the midst of a 
storm, when the ship, holding by her anchors, 
seemed threatened with destruction, even under 
the shadow of the shore. Turning his languid eye 
upon his son at the bedside, he asked, in the lan- 
guage of the ruling passion of his soul, "Do I 



78 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

seem to drag my anchors ? They do not drag, 
they are sure and steadfast." After he had been 
silent for some time, and was supposed to be 
speechless, he waved his hand in farewell, and 
said, "All is well !" and thus he left the shores of 
time for the fairer scenes of the eternal world. 

To any without hope of eternal life I can offer 
that hope with full assurance that if you will 
fulfill the conditions it shall be yours. In He- 
brews there is a comparison of the soul that seeks 
salvation to a man who had fled for refuge, "to 
lay hold upon the hope" set before him. Will 
you lay hold upon that hope ? The one condition 
is to drop your sins and take hold with both hands 
— with, all your heart, with all your strength — of 
the life-line of mercy. 

A man fell into an old well. His cry for help 
attracted a neighbor, who let down a rope and at- 
tempted to draw him up; but the rope kept slip- 
ping through the man's hands. At last the man 
at the top of the well shouted down to him, "Have 
you something in your hands?" "Yes," replied 
the man at the bottom, "I have some parcels here 
which I very much desire to bring up with me." 
But he finally had to drop all his parcels and then 
there was enough muscular power in his arms to 
hold tight to the rope till he was safe in the upper 



THE PROMISE OF HOPE 



79 



air. Are you seeking salvation, longing to be a 
Christian man or woman and know the gladness 
of the Christian hope, and yet finding yourself 
day after day in the horrible pit of evil, though 
the golden chain of salvation dangles ever within 
reach of your hands ? Drop your sins. They will 
paralyze your fingers and rob your muscles of 
strength. You will die in the pit of your iniquity, 
without God and without hope in the world, unless 
you drop your sins and with all your power take 
hold of Jesus Christ. The moment you do that 
he will lift you out of the mire and the clay, place 
your feet upon the eternal rock, and put songs of 
praise on your lips. 



80 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



VIII 

The Promise of Angelic Companionship 

He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep 
thee in all thy ways. — Psalm xci, 11. 

There are so many windows into the soul from 
the world of physical phenomena surrounding us 
that we are constantly in danger of becoming ma- 
terialists and thinking of life as only a place for 
eating and drinking and making sure of our phys- 
ical comfort. When we thus permit ourselves to 
be deceived we are great losers. It is the glory 
of our humanity that this world is only the ves- 
tibule of our existence. The human body is only 
one of our houses. It is the first one, and it is 
not strange that we feel kindly toward it, that we 
patch it up the best we can, and keep it as long as 
Ave can. But when we are tempted to act as 
though it were our only house, and that when it 
falls to pieces and goes down, beaten to rack and 
ruin by the storms of the years, we are homeless, 
we are cheated beyond all our power to conceive. 

We are spiritual beings living in this material 
world, clothed for a time with this physical body, 



THE PEOMISE OF ANGELIC COMPANIONSHIP 81 

so marvelously constructed that it is obedient to 
the control of the spiritual personality which oc- 
cupies it. There are other spiritual beings in the 
world, at least who visit our world and have du- 
ties connected with it, who are not clothed upon 
with physical bodies which may be discerned by 
the natural eye or by the touch of a human hand. 
In the Bible they are called angels. They are pure 
and holy beings who have never sinned against 
God, who have always been dominated by the 
spirit of perfect love, and who give themselves 
with complete surrender to the divine purposes of 
God in the salvation of men. We are assured that 
God sends them on missions of mercy to men and 
women on the earth. If we examine the divine 
record we note many different classes of missions 
where angels have served the purposes of God. 

Sometimes God sends them in warning. When 
Lot moved into Sodom, and settled down to do 
business in that wicked city, God did not forget 
him. Although he had not lived as he should have 
lived, God did not give him up without an effort. 
O, the infinite mercy of God to his children ! 
Some of you know what that means. You have 
been cold and lukewarm in your service of the 
Lord, and faulty in the doing of your duty, and 
you have pitched your tent toward Sodom; and 
6 



82 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

yet God has followed after you with warning 
angels, to turn you back to righteousness. 

At last Sodom waxed so very bad that God de- 
termined on its destruction. But he would not 
destroy it without giving Lot a chance of escape. 
And he sent two angels to him to warn him and 
give him an opportunity to save his family if he 
could. But, alas, they had been drawn away into 
such wicked associations that many of them would 
not leave. And the angels tugging at Lot's hand 
hastened the old man with two of his children out 
of the city as the judgment of God fell upon it. 

In the case of Balaam you may see another very 
conspicuous instance where God used angels to 
warn of temptation to sin. Balaam's love for 
money was drawing him rapidly on the road to 
ruin. He was on his way to take a bribe from the 
enemies of God. But God gave him another 
chance. At a narrow place in the path on his 
journey the angel of God stood with a drawn 
sword, warning him of his danger. Balaam un- 
derstood the warning, but did not heed it, and the 
end of the man was dark and desperate. Are 
God's angels warning you? Have they come to 
you in the quiet of the evening, and spoken to 
you of the danger of your course ? Have they 
come to you with drawn sword and revealed to 



THE PEOMISE OF ANGELIC COMPANIONSHIP 83 

you the impending ruin if you did not change 
your course? It may be even now that they are 
tugging at your hand, as they tugged at the hand 
of Lot, to pull you out of your Sodom. Heed 
God's angels and hearken to their warning! 

We are assured that angels are greatly inter- 
ested in the conversion of sinners. Christ says 
that there is joy among the angels of God over 
every sinner that repenteth, and Paul declares 
that one of the things the angels are very curious 
about, the mystery of which they are constantly 
desiring to look into, is the plan of salvation. 
Angels have always followed the plan of salvation 
from the very beginning with loving interest. It 
was an angel who announced the birth of Jesus 
to the shepherds on the plains of Bethlehem. It 
was a choir of angels who sang the first Christian 
anthem. Angels came to comfort Jesus in the 
wilderness after he had been forty days tempted 
of the devil. In the garden of Gethsemane, in 
the hour of Christ's agony, angels came and com- 
forted him. On the first Easter morning it was 
an angel which descended from heaven and rolled 
back the stone from the sepulcher, and angel 
guards remained about the empty tomb to speak 
messages of loving comfort to the disciples. At 
the ascension of Jesus angels remained behind to 



84 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

say to his astonished friends that he would come 
again in glory. So, throughout the whole earthly 
history of Jesus Christ and his loving sacrifice for 
men, angels watched with tender interest and 
helpfulness. Every time a sinner listens to the 
gospel, and turns his feet toward the cross of 
Christ, angels fill heaven with joy at the good 
news. Our Saviour has declared that the angels 
shall he witnesses to his confession of us hef ore the 
throne of God. One of his sweetest promises is 
that if we confess him here hefore men he will 
confess us before his Father and the holy angels. 

Angels watch the pathway of those who trust 
God and do his will, in their defense. The 
psalmist says that "The angel of the Lord en- 
campeth round about them." How splendid is 
that figure ! The thought is that of an army which 
goes into camp to defend against any enemy that 
may come. So God's angels camp between his 
children and their foes. 

One of the most beautiful illustrations showing 
how God sends his angels to encamp about those 
who trust him is in the story of Elisha. The king 
of Syria, finding that Elisha was the chief coun- 
selor of the king of Israel, conceived the brilliant 
plan of capturing the prophet. So he sent a 
large army and surrounded the town of Dothan, 



THE PEOMISE OF ANGELIC COMPANIONSHIP 85 

where his scouts had informed him Elisha and his 
secretary were staying overnight. In the morning 
when his young man arose and went out to see 
what kind of a day it was to be, he was astonished 
and horrified to see a great army of Syrian sol- 
diers entirely surrounding the town. To him it 
could mean only one thing: they were after his 
master, and would certainly take him prisoner. 
He hurried back, and at the door he met Elisha 
coming forth, and he cried out to him, "Alas, my 
master! How shall we do?" But Elisha placidly 
responded, "Fear not: for they that be with us 
are more than they that be with them." And 
Elisha prayed, and said, "Lord, I pray thee, open 
his eyes, that he may see." And the Lord an- 
wered that prayer, and the young man's eyes never 
did open so wide as when he saw that the moun- 
tain about the town was full of horses and chariots 
of fire round about Elisha. God's angelic armies 
were encamped about his prophet, and they threw 
the hosts of Syria into confusion, and Elisha went 
forth unharmed. Let us not fail of the comfort 
of this beautiful picture. Are you doing God's 
work with unselfish devotion ? Then you may 
trust him to send more soldiers to guard over you 
than can possibly be brought against you. Be 
sure you are doing right, then you may have 



86 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

absolute rest, because angels will see to your 
defense. 

God sends his angels to minister to bis children 
in their sorrow and trouble. The writer of the 
book of Hebrews, speaking of angels, says, "Are 
they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to min- 
ister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?'' 
And it is not only some aristocrats of righteous- 
ness, like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob among 
the patriarchs, or like Paul or Peter or John 
among the apostles ; but the humblest and poorest 
and meanest of those who have loved the name of 
God, though they have blundered and sinned until 
they scarcely dare lift their faces out of the sand 
in their humiliation, are ministered to by God's 
angels, who come to comfort them in the deep 
sorrows and troubles of life. This thought is beau- 
tifully illustrated in the story of Hagar. Poor 
Hagar, her life had not been happy; more sinned 
against than sinning, she had been forced into 
exile and loneliness, and now, in the desert, she is 
lost, and her son is dying. She cannot see him 
die, and she goes a little way off, her heart break- 
ing, and she cries aloud unto God. And then a 
wonderful thing happened — that is, wonderful to 
people who are wrapped up in this material world, 
but something as natural as when the flower bulb 



THE PEOMISE OF ANGELIC COMPANIONSHIP 87 

answers to the sun in springtime. An angel of 
God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto 
her, "What aileth thee, Hagar ? fear not ; for God 
hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, 
lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand, for I 
will make him a great nation. And God opened 
her eyes, and she saw the well of water; and she 
went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave 
the lad drink." N". P. Willis, the poet, says : 

"She stood beside the well her God had given 
To gush in that deep wilderness, and bathed 
The forehead of her child until he laughed 
In his reviving happiness, and lisped 
His infant thought of gladness at the sight 
Of the cool plashing of his mother's hand." 

Let every sorrowing heart take comfort at this 
picture. God who sent his angel to minister to 
Hagar in her sorrow has abundant angels to point 
out wells of comfort for you in the darkest hour 
that can ever come. 

Angels conduct Christians home to heaven at 
death. Jesus made this very clear in his story of 
Dives and Lazarus. The Master says that Laz- 
arus was carried by angels to Abraham's bosom. 
If we take into our heart all these illustrations of 
angelic ministry and love, it must protect our 
ideas of life from loneliness. God sends his angels 



88 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



to warn us when we are tempted to sin. His 
angels watch over us with rejoicing when we give 
our hearts to him. Angels defend us when the 
armies of Satan come against us with wicked in- 
tent. Angels minister to us in every emergency 
of sorrow and trial, and when at last the time 
shall come for us to lay aside this earthly taber- 
nacle and go to dwell in the "house not made with 
hands, eternal in the heavens," the house which 
Jesus our Saviour has been preparing for us, the 
angels who have been ministering to us all the 
way will bear us home. The old camp-meeting 
hymn which I have heard sung by thousands of 
voices in the great groves of the West, 

"Oh, come, angel band! 
Come and around me stand; 
Oh, bear me away on your snowy wings 
To my immortal home," 

is warranted by the promises of God's Word. Let 
us give ourselves with complete devotion to the 
service of God, to the ministry of angels, to the 
fellowship of all goodness, that an abundant en- 
trance may be given to us into our immortal life. 



THE PKOMISE OF SLEEP 



89 



IX 

The Promise op Sleep 

He giveth his beloved sleep. — Psalm cxxvii, 2. 
Thy sleep shall he sweet. — Proverbs iii, 24. 

A remarkably interesting and instructive 
book, entitled The Mystery of Sleep, has recently 
been written by Dr. John Bigelow, of New York 
city. This writer, who has given great study and 
exhaustive research to the subject, raises many 
interesting and pertinent questions in regard to 
the purposes and benefits of sleep. He raises the 
serious question as to why average persons should 
be required by the inexorable laws of their ex- 
istence to spend eight out of every twenty-four 
hours, or one third of their entire lives, in sleep. 
He seeks to discover why so large a part of every 
day is apparently wasted, and why this apparent 
waste is made one of the conditions of life not 
only to men and women, but in the animal and 
vegetable kingdoms as well. 

Dr. Bigelow is not satisfied with the ordinary 
answer that we sleep in order that we may rest 
and repair the waste tissues. He does not believe 



90 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

that that is a satisfactory answer to the question 
as to why we are compelled to sleep one hour out 
of three, eight hours out of every twenty-four, 
four months out of every year, and twenty- three 
years out of every threescore years and ten. He 
seriously assails this position by asserting that we 
do not rest when we sleep in any sense in which 
we do not rest when awake. He pertinently asks : 
"What faculty of the spiritual or the physical 
nature of man is in repose during sleep? What 
single function or energy of the body is then ab- 
solutely suspended ? Certainly not our hearts, 
which do not enjoy a moment's rest from the hour 
of our birth to our decease. The heart is always 
engaged in the effort to send our blood, latent with 
vital energy, through every vein, artery, and tissue 
of our bodies." And so he goes on, taking up 
various organs of the human frame, and shows 
that nothing rests while we sleep. 

I have not time to follow this line of thought, 
although it is very interesting, but wish to discuss 
another proposition made by Dr. Bigelow, which 
is that the great purpose of sleep is to disassociate 
us periodically from the world in which we live, 
and in a sense to regenerate us morally and spir- 
itually. To his mind we have in sleep conditions 
which are in harmony with one of the supreme 



THE PEOMISE OF SLEEP 



91 



behests of a Christian life — utter deliverance from 
the domination of the phenomenal world; an en- 
tire emancipation, for these few sleeping hours, 
from the cares and ambitions of the life into which 
we were born and to the indulgence of which we 
are inclined by nature to surrender the service of 
all our vital energies. If it be a good thing to live 
above the world, to regard our earthly life as 
transitory, as designed to educate us for a more 
elevated existence, to serve us as a means, not an 
end, then we have in sleep, apparently, an ally 
and coadjutor — at least, to the extent of delivering 
us for several hours every day from a servile de- 
pendence upon what ought to be a good slave but 
is always a bad master. 

Other thinkers have believed in this purpose of 
sleep. Horace Bushnell once said that a man must 
be next to a devil who wakes angry, and that after 
sleep, which is an unconscious Sabbath, we begin 
another day, and every day is Monday. It was 
his view that this kind economy of sleep con- 
stantly inclined us to good dispositions, that the 
acrid and sour ingredients of evil, the grudges, 
the wounds of feeling, the morose fault-findings, 
the black torments of misanthropy, are so far 
tempered and sweetened by God's gentle discipline 
of sleep that we probably do not even conceive how 



92 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

demoniacally bitter the world would become if no 
such kind interruption broke their spell. 

There are many historical illustrations to sup- 
port this view both in the lack of sleep and in the 
benefits of it. Lord Byron told George Ticknor 
that he wrote the English Bards and Scotch Re- 
viewers in the country, the winter before he set 
forth on his travels, while a heavy fall of snow 
was on the ground, and that he kept house for a 
month, during which time he never saw the 
light of day, rising in the evening after dark and 
going to bed in the morning before dawn. This 
certainly offers an explanation of the tone, spirit, 
and purpose of that most brutal and cruel satire. 
For a whole month Byron lived largely on strong 
drink, took no wholesome sleep, and wrote with 
the spirit of the bottomless pit guiding his pen. 

That Napoleon Bonaparte slept only about half 
as much as the average man of affairs is a fact 
often commented upon. Perhaps the lack of the 
restraining and spiritualizing influences of sleep 
may account, largely, for the monster incarnation 
of selfishness which he became. 

After showing that John Calvin, while pursu- 
ing his theological studies, used frequently to 
work all night without sleep and then work on 
through the day, Mr. Bigelow raises the question 



THE PEOMISE OF SLEEP 



93 



whether some of those relentless doctrines, from 
under the spell of which a great part of the re- 
ligious world is just now coming out, might not 
have had another putting if Calvin had had 
wholesome sleep as a regenerating spiritual in- 
fluence during those years. 

In the Bible we have a remarkable instance of 
God's power to change the thought and purpose 
of a man in his sleep. Jacob, on his journey 
toward Padan-aram, sore-hearted and lonely, 
lighted upon a certain place and tarried there all 
night, because the sun was set. He took a stone 
for his pillow and lay down to sleep. As he slept 
he had a glorious vision, the most comforting part 
of which was that he felt the presence of God, 
full of mercy toward himself. When he awoke 
he exclaimed: "Surely the Lord is in this place; 
and I knew it not. This is none other but the 
house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." He 
arose, took the stone that he had put under his 
head, and set it up for a pillar and poured oil upon 
it, and called the name of that place Beth-el. If 
Jacob had spent that night walking the floor and 
worrying over his troubles, no such blessing could 
have come and no such morning could have 
dawned for him. 

In our texts we have the promise of sleep as a 



94 THE GEEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

blessing bestowed upon those who seek to do God's 
will and who are his beloved. It is promised as 
one of the greatest blessings that God can give. 
Largely wrapped up with our happiness and peace 
is this question of sleep. 

The great destroyer of sleep is sin. Daniel, in 
telling the story of Nebuchadnezzar and of 
Darius, uses in one case the significant words, 
"And his sleep brake from him," and in the other, 
"His sleep went from him." Many men and 
women in the world get no sweet sleep because 
of their sins. Shakespeare makes Macbeth en- 
large upon the blessedness of "innocent sleep" 
after his murder of Duncan and after he had 
forfeited forever the capacity for such sleep 
himself : 

"Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more! 
Macbeth does murder sleep' — the innocent sleep, 
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, 
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, 
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, 
Chief nourisher in life's feast." 

And again he makes Iago taunt Othello by saying : 

"Not poppy, nor mandragora, 
Nor all the drowsy sirups of the world, 
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
Which thou ow'dst yesterday." 



THE PROMISE OF SLEEP 



95 



It is the glory of our blessed religion that Christ 
has power to treat a poor soul whose sins drive 
sleep from his eyes and make him as unhappy as 
the demon-possessed man in the land of the Gada- 
renes, and bring back again to him the sweet sleep 
of the innocent child. Only the Great Physician 
can exercise a power like that. 

An overweening anxiety for worldly success 
often banishes sleep, and with it the humanizing 
and blessed influence which comes with sleep. 
The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes utters a 
great truth when, speaking of the growth of world- 
liness on the man who pursues it, he says: "He 
that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver ; 
nor he that loveth abundance with increase. When 
goods increase, they are increased that eat them: 
and what good is there to the owners thereof, sav- 
ing the beholding of them with their eyes ?" And 
then this shrewd observer, who spoke out of wide 
experience and observation, says, "The abundance 
of the rich will not suffer him to sleep." There 
are a great many people who would be glad to 
forego a large part of their fortunes if they could 
sleep again as they could before ambition and 
anxiety had begun to possess them. To turn again 
to Shakespeare, where will we find a more striking 
illustration of our theme than in that thrilling 



96 THE GEEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



soliloquy of Henry IV, when the king is made 
to say, as he longs for sleep in vain : 

"How many thousand of my poorest subjects 
Are at this hour asleep! — Sleep, O gentle Sleep, 
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, 
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down, 
Nor steep my senses in forgetfulness? 
Why rather, Sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs, 
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee, 
And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, 
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great, 
Under the canopies of costly state, 
And lulled with sounds of sweetest melody? 
O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile 
In loathsome beds, and leav'st the kingly coucb 
A watch case or a common 'larum bell? 
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast 
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains 
In cradle of the rude imperious surge, 
And in the visitation of the winds, 
Who take the ruffian billows by the top, 
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them 
With deafening clamor in the slippery shrouds, 
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes? — 
Canst thou, partial Sleep, give thy repose 
To the wet sea-boy, in an hour so rude; 
And in the calmest and most stillest night, 
With all appliances and means to boot, 
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down! 
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." 

The teachings of these scriptures and this phi- 
losophy is that we should hold our business and 



THE PEOMISE OF SLEEP 



97 



all our worldly affairs to be our servants, and not 
permit them to become our masters. Poor s]ave 
is be who is servant to bis goods. 

Tbe best friend of sleep is a good conscience. 
David said, "I will both lay me down in peace 
and sleep: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell 
in safety." The man who can say his prayers out 
of a confiding heart, leaving all his business and 
all he loves and all his destiny in God's hand, 
feeling that it is in the hand of his heavenly 
Father, can sleep with a sleep so sweet that no 
guilty soul can even conceive of it. 

Another help to good sleep is wholesome work — 
work that fills the mind and the heart as well as 
the hands. The writer of Ecclesiastes, whom we 
quoted a while ago, also says, "The sleep of a 
laboring man is sweet, whether he eat little or 
much." That is, his life may be very humble; 
the physical life not nourished as well as it might 
be. Yet in his life of simple and quiet labor he 
finds his sleep to be sweet. This is peculiarly 
true where the labor is such that it gives inspira- 
tion to the mind and joy to the heart. In the 
Song of Songs the author says, "I sleep, but my 
heart waketh." It is like that sleep which comes 
to us when we lie down with perfect content and 
with hopeful anticipations for the morning. .We 
7 



98 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

ought to live all our lives like that. It requires 
confidence in God and the acceptance of our daily 
work as a part of his plan for us. J eremiah, God's 
faithful prophet, after one of his prophetic visions 
says, "Upon this I awaked, and beheld; and my 
sleep was sweet unto me." If we fret and chafe 
about our work it will largely spoil our sleep ; but 
if we take our daily toil as God-given, and seek 
to perform the labor not as unto men only, but as 
unto God, there will come a charm about it that 
will minister to the contentment of our minds and 
help to sweeten our sleep. 

We must not close this study without noting 
that in the Bible the death of good people is often 
compared to sleep. Paul, in one of his addresses 
recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, says, "David, 
after he had served his own generation by the will 
of God, fell on sleep." And again, in speaking of 
the resurrection of Christ, he says that Jesus ap- 
peared "to five hundred brethren at once, of whom 
the greater part remain until now, but some are 
fallen asleep." And again he says, "But now is 
Christ risen from the dead, and become the first- 
fruits of them that slept." Luke, describing the 
death of Stephen, says that he kneeled down and 
cried with a loud voice, "Lord, lay not this sin to 
their charge. And when he had said this, he fell 



THE PROMISE OF SLEEP 



99 



asleep." When Jesus went to raise Lazarus from 
the dead he said to his disciples : "Our friend 
Lazarus sleepeth; but I go that I may wake him 
out of sleep." And there are many other such 
references in the New Testament. 

Surely all these scriptures must suggest to us 
that death is no more unnatural than going to 
sleep, and if we live in perfect love and harmony 
with our heavenly Father, doing his will, we shall 
have no more fear of the one than of the other. It 
is said of Sir Thomas Browne, who wrote in the 
seventeenth century a volume entitled Religio 
Medici, that he saw so little difference between 
sleep and death that he dared not lie down in his 
bed at night without having a colloquy with God. 
This same reverent and devout man wrote an 
evening hymn in which he says : 

"Sleep is a death; O make me try, 
By sleeping, what it is to die; 
And as gently lay my head 
On my grave, as now my bed. 
Howe'er I rest, great God, let me 
Awake again at least with thee. 
And thus assured, behold I lie 
Securely, or to wake or die. 
These are my drowsy days; in vain 
I do now wake to sleep again: 
O come that hour, when I shall never 
Sleep again, but wake forever." 



100 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



X 

The Promised Hiding Place 

In the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pa- 
vilion. — Psalm xxvii, 5. 

This is a world in which any physician who 
has a cure for trouble can get a hearing, for into 
the brightest life there come many dark days. 
Our lives are like a kaleidoscope with ever-chang- 
ing pictures, where light and shadow forever chase 
each other on the horizon, and where at any time 
may come the blackness of real trouble. ~No man 
is powerful enough, or rich enough, or sufficiently 
wise to guarantee to himself certain prosperity or 
happiness. Dark clouds may come on the after- 
noon of the brightest morning. Long ago a very 
wise man wrote, "If a man live many years, and 
rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the 
days of darkness, for they shall be many." 

But David declares to us he has found a hiding 
place and a refuge in trouble. With boldness he 
proclaims that "In the time of trouble he shall 
hide me in his pavilion : in the secret of his taber- 
nacle shall he hide me ; he shall set me up upon a 



THE PROMISED HIDING PLACE 101 

rock." This registers the psalmist's faith in God 
and his confidence in the inner spiritual nature as 
being of greater account than the outward condi- 
tions. For you will notice that all this provision 
which God was to make for the peace and happi- 
ness of David was spiritual. David was to be 
made safe and secure from trouble not because 
the storm would not beat upon him as upon his 
neighbor, but because in the day of trouble he 
should be sheltered under the pavilion of God, he 
should have a peace and a joy of soul only to be 
found in the secret of the tabernacle of God, he 
should rest in a stability known only to those 
whose feet are upon the Eock of Ages. ISTow, 
though the world is a good many centuries older 
than it was in David's day, it is in all its great 
characteristics the same world still, and our hu- 
man nature is the same. Trouble is still the com- 
mon lot, and we have as great need as did the 
psalmist to find a hiding place in the pavilion of 
God on the day of storm. Let us study for a little 
time how God hides us in the day of trouble. 

In the first place, sincere and genuine worship 
of God and obedience to God prepare our minds 
and hearts to face the troubles of life. They put 
strength into our moral muscle; stimulate our 
spiritual nerve, and give us a courage not possible 



102 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

otherwise. As ease and physical dissipation and 
debauch will render the body weak and nerveless, 
so that it falls an easy prey to disease or is unfit 
to meet any attack upon it from an enemy, so sin 
of every kind deteriorates the moral nature and 
weakens the mind and heart so that we are unfit 
to sustain ourselves against any trouble or sorrow 
that may come. We all know that in time of 
trouble the spirit with which we face it amounts 
to more than anything else. Trouble meets two 
men situated exactly alike so far as outward cir- 
cumstances are concerned. One lies down weak 
and helpless, falls into despair, and dies. The 
other summons his courage, faces the storm with 
composure, and achieves the greatest victory of 
his life. The difference is not without, it is all 
within. 

Some time ago ten men and one woman landed 
in New York after a terrible experience at sea. 
They had been on a crippled sailing vessel for 
twenty-seven days. Their vessel was completely 
disabled and beyond control. Signals of distress 
were hoisted and lights were burned at night, but 
they were not seen. At last they were compelled 
to abandon the ship. The only provisions they 
had left were bread and water. They crowded 
into the one boat the storm had spared and set 



THE PEOMISED HIDING PLACE 103 

out from the wreck, hoping to reach land. They 
suffered ten days and nights before they reached 
one of the Windward Isles. A passing steamer 
brought them to New York. On arrival here the 
crew reported that during that terrible time of 
suspense and hardship the strongest sank in de- 
spair; they would have completely lost heart and 
given up the struggle had it not been for the cheer- 
fulness and courage of the only woman on board, 
the wife of the captain, a young girl only twenty- 
three years old, whose untiring devotion and un- 
wavering hope gave courage to all. The strongest 
man could have been better spared from the boat 
than she, whose indomitable spirit cheered and 
encouraged the others. So it is that the religion 
of Jesus Christ, the sincere worship of God, shel- 
ters the Christian in the day of trouble by sus- 
taining in his breast a brave spirit. To such a 
man all other troubles seem small compared to 
disloyalty to God. And so long as there is peace 
with God everything else is too insignificant to 
worry about. The secret of the greatest heroism 
is in this sheltering of the soul under the pavilion 
of God. 

Dr. Thomas Guthrie tells us that there was a 
man in Scotland once so in love with prayer that 
he was accustomed to retire to his old church in 



104 THE GEEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

the town of Ayr and spend whole nights upon his 
knees, till, it was said, they grew hard as the stones 
on which he knelt. But that which made the 
knees callous softened and sanctified the heart, 
inspiring it at the same time with heroic courage. 
He was fit mate of her, John Knox's daughter, 
who, on King James offering to set her husband 
free if he would own the king's supremacy within 
Christ's church, replied, as she held out her apron, 
"I would rather keep his head there." She would 
rather carry his poor, bleeding head in her apron 
to the grave than have him faithless to God. When 
our faith in God and our devotion is like that we 
are hidden in the pavilion of God from the 
troubles of life. 

Second, God uses the memory of good deeds and 
past efforts to serve him to comfort and shelter 
the good man in affliction. Eeflection and memory 
are either a great comfort or a great curse to every 
one of us as we go on in life. To the sinner the 
remembrance of the past in time of trouble only 
adds bitterness to his cup of sorrow. Oftentimes 
it is the bitterest ingredient in the cruel draught. 
A man has gone on careless and indifferent, sin- 
ning against God with a light heart, without tak- 
ing much notice of it during his day of prosperity, 
and then the day of trouble comes, the clouds of 



THE PEOMISED HIDING PLACE 105 

sorrow and trial gather on every hand, and in that 
black hour all his past life comes up before him. 
Deeds that were once done lightly, now, for the 
first time, he recognizes to be of terribly serious 
importance. From every sin there is accusation 
and threatening, and he finds that in his careless 
days he has been planting thorns in his pillow, on 
which he must lie now in the day of trouble. All 
about him is trouble, and there is nothing in his 
past to comfort him. Vilhelm Krag, a Norwe- 
gian poet, has recently written a sad little poem 
which gives utterance to the thoughts of a man in 
such a situation: 

"It withers, it withers, 

"It withers, it withers, — 
The world withers, and roses, and women, 
My body and all the quivering nerves 
Wither! 

And Time, it goes creeping slowly past me, 
And the Hours walk by to dig my grave. 
I dare not think — I dare not live. 
Dare not die!" 

What a different song the Christian man has to 
sing in the day of trial and trouble who, looking 
back, is comforted with many a good day's work 
for God and humanity and is consoled with many 
a memory of God's mercies and with the assur- 
ance that he will not now be deserted. David 



106 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

says that in the hour of trouble he will remember 
the songs God has given him in the night ; other 
nights as dark as this, and still God made his 
heart to sing. Paul and Silas in the Philippian 
dungeon at midnight recalled such memories of 
past victories in the service of Christ as to fill 
their hearts and their voices with melody. The 
pavilion of God sheltered them, so that the jailer 
had no power to bind them. 

It was in the same spirit that Kobert Browning, 
facing the troubles of weakness and age, was con- 
strained to sing : 

"Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be, 
The last of life, for which the first was made; 
Our times are in His hand 
Who saith, 'A whole I planned; 
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be 
afraid!'" 

Third, the consciousness of God's loving favor 
soothes the good man and the true woman in life's 
sorest troubles. While there is no reflection that 
can give a man so much bitterness in time of 
trouble as the consciousness that he is a sinner 
against God and that in the very logic of the case 
God is against him; so, on the other hand, in the 
hour of trouble nothing is such a precious comfort 



THE PROMISED HIDING PLACE 107 



to the Christian as the consciousness that God 
loves him and cares for him and that he may rely 
upon a friendship with heaven which is unalter- 
able. This is a pavilion which goes with us like 
the traveler's tent. It is always up-to-date. 
Every year on the first of January all the dies 
bearing date from which were made United 
States coins during the previous year are de- 
stroyed. This is done to prevent their falling into 
the hands of counterfeiters. At the same time the 
new dies for the new year are brought into use. 
While the old dies are undergoing destruction the 
mints of the nation start upon making gold, silver, 
nickel, and copper coin, from the gold double 
eagle down to the copper cent, all bearing the im- 
pression of the new year's die. God's mercies are 
like that, for we are assured that "the Lord's mer- 
cies are new every morning," and the Christian 
has a movable pavilion following him, overshadow- 
ing him, protecting him, in the troubles of life. 

With such a consciousness of God's presence in 
the midst of earth's troubles, as John McNeill 
says, all our troubles will become toothless tigers 
to us. God will take the teeth out of them. 

The illustrations which God uses to reveal him- 
self to us, the very names he asks us to call him, 
are a pavilion of shelter when our hearts believe 



108 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



on him. The story is told of a little girl who fol- 
lowed the workmen from her father's grounds 
when they went home to their dinner, because she 
was very fond of a kind old man who was one of 
them. Looking out from his cottage door he saw 
her, and invited her to go into the cottage. She 
looked in, saw the strange faces around the table, 
and hesitated. When he urged her, she raised her 
sweet face and inquired: 

"Is there any mother here ?" 

a Yes, my dear, there's a mother here," he an- 
swered. 

"0, then I'll go in ; for I am not afraid if there 
is a mother there !" 

She had every confidence in a mother's sym- 
pathy. What infinite comfort there should be for 
us in the promise that "as one whom his mother 
comforteth," God is ready to comfort and bless us. 

The promises of God are rich and abundant and 
beyond all question to the sincere soul who is in 
trouble, no matter how desperate the emergency. 
He explicitly invites us, saying, "Call upon me in 
the day of trouble, and I will answer thee." And 
again we have the assurance, "Fear thou not ; for I 
am with thee : be not dismayed ; for I am thy God : 
I will strengthen thee ; yea, I will help thee ; yea, 
I will uphold thee with the right hand of my 



THE PEOMISED HIDING PLACE 109 

righteousness. . . . Fear not: for I have re- 
deemed thee, I have called thee by thy name ; thou 
art mine. When thou passest through the waters, 
I will be with thee ; and through the rivers, they 
shall not overflow thee : when thou walkest through 
the fire, thou shalt not be burned ; neither shall the 
flame kindle upon thee. For I am the Lord thy 
God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour." 

Fourth, the good man has an unfailing source 
of comfort in the hope of heaven and eternal life. 
]STo matter how dark it may grow in this world, 
the heavenly world is always bright to his eyes. 
Trouble may abound here, but his eye is on a 
country where there is no sorrow or trouble. Like 
Abraham, he beholds "a city which hath founda- 
tions, whose builder and maker is God." He has 
visions of a beautiful clime where there is no 
sickness, nor pain, nor death, nor tears ; a land of 
eternal joy. When a man is only a passenger on 
a ship or a train, and knows that the voyage or 
the journey will soon be over, it does not require 
a great deal of patience to put up with what would 
seem unbearable if there were no limits set to the 
endurance. A man laughs at the narrow quarters 
in the steamship where he scarcely has room to 
turn around, because his thought is on the harbor 
and the home that lie beyond. So the Christian 



110 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

knows that he is only a traveler here, only a pas- 
senger through this world, and the troubles and 
annoyances of travel are a small thing compared 
with the blessedness of the home toward which he 
is sailing. 

When General Lafayette paid his last visit to 
this country the people of New York city gave 
him a royal reception. A large number of vessels 
went out to meet him, and many bands of music 
played "Hail to the Chief " and the national music 
of France, but the old soldier was calm and un- 
moved. When he stepped on shore the whole 
world about seemed shaken with the thunder of 
the salute, and the soldiers did him honor as to a 
conqueror as they shouted his welcome, and 
through it all there was no sign of emotion on his 
strong face. In the midst of shouting and cheers 
and waving flags the great Frenchman was taken 
under triumphal arches to the famous old Castle 
Garden, and there were gathered the greatest men 
of the American Kepublic to give greeting to La- 
fayette, and still his face was calm. But we are 
told that when he had taken his seat in the great 
amphitheater the curtain was lifted and he saw 
before him an almost perfect representation of the 
place in France where he was born and brought 
up, and when he saw the old home, so filled with 



THE PROMISED HIDING PLACE 111 



tender memories, the home where his father and 
mother had lived and died, then Lafayette was 
touched, and, bowing his face in his hands, he 
wept like a child. So, if with true hearts we face 
the future with trust in God and hope in Jesus 
Christ, there can be no trouble so dark, there can 
be no emergency so desperate, but we shall behold 
the heaven which is our home. There are our 
loved ones who have gone before — father, mother, 
child, friends dearer than our own hearts are 
there; our hearts behold them now. What can 
any troubles amount to so long as we are on the 
way to them and shall soon be with them % 



112 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



XI 

The Promised Escape 

Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed 
lest he fall. There hath no temptation taken you but 
such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who 
will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; 
but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, 
that ye may be able to bear it. — 1 Corinthians x, 12, 13. 

Pride and self-satisfaction are always out of 
place in human life. We are constantly liable to 
temptation to evil. Paul, after he had been many 
years in the way, and had accomplished much as 
the soldier of Jesus Christ, felt that he needed to 
be ceaselessly on his guard lest, having preached 
to others, he should himself become a castaway. 

Travelers in the Alps tell us that a very slight 
atmospheric change will sometimes transform an 
ascent of one of the great historic mountains from 
a perfectly safe and pleasurable experience into a 
most perilous attempt. So in our everyday lives 
what appears to be an entirely safe experience for 
us suddenly becomes fraught with temptation and 
danger, and we walk as a climber creeps on the 
edge of a precipice. 



THE PEOMISED ESCAPE 



113 



Our human lives are often compared to a 
voyage, and it is imperative, if we would make a 
successful voyage, that we should take frequent 
reckonings of the heavenly bodies. A ship at sea 
cannot measure her course by another ship, or by 
some floating derelict, or by the restless waves; 
if it be beyond sight of solid headlands or light- 
house, its course must be reckoned by the sun or 
by the stars. We must make our reckoning by the 
laws of God. We must measure our course and 
judge of our position by our relation to the divine 
laws. 

We need to beware of the beginnings of tempta- 
tion. Many of the most terrible temptations that 
have ever cursed humanity are at the beginning 
but a silky cobweb, seductive and fascinating, and 
giving no indications of the terrible danger that 
lies behind them. George Eliot gives in Romola 
the picture of a man, good, generous, handsome, 
with all the appliances and means of doing good, 
who, because he tried to slip away from every- 
thing that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing 
so much as his own safety, came, at last, to commit 
some of the basest deeds, such as make men in- 
famous. Many there are who are led into the 
fearful thraldom of the appetite for strong drink, 

to whom the beginning of temptation is so charm- 
8 



114 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

ing and so utterly void of appearance of evil that 
the victim is completely deceived. When they 
first look on the wine it is so red, it gives such a 
beautiful color in the cup, it adds such a flush of 
enthusiasm and gayety to the social hour, that it 
does not seem possible that the serpent that bites 
and the adder that stings lie coiled and lurking in 
its rich depths. And yet, in the background, 
drunkenness and all the loathsome and beastly 
retinue that follow in the train of it are waiting. 
The only safety is to beware of the beginnings of 
temptation. 

Many people with good intentions are in danger 
from false security. David tells us that in his 
days of prosperity he said, "I shall never be 
moved," and yet it was in that hour when he 
thought himself so immovable that he fell into 
sin that came near being his eternal destruction. 
Nothing could be more perilous to the Christian 
than to become so self-congratulatory about his 
own religious experience that he forgets that he 
owes it all to the goodness and mercy of God and 
that he is dependent every moment of his life 
upon the Holy Spirit for all of his religious hap- 
piness and spiritual strength. The moment a man 
forgets that, he loses his humility and becomes 
self-sufficient and proud and is in immediate peril 



THE PEOMISED ESCAPE 



115 



of overthrow. Many of the saddest defections 
from the Christian character have come in the 
case of men and women who have made profession, 
and no donbt sincerely and honestly so, of entire 
sanctification and perfect holiness. They came 
to trust in themselves, to think somehow they were 
a separate order of God's children, and did not 
need to be every moment alert and watchful lest 
they enter temptation. And so they came broken 
to the earth from the highest possible profession. 
Let us be warned — not from professing Christ and 
giving God the glory for every blessing he be- 
stows on us ; but let us be warned against careless- 
ness and presumption, that we walk softly before 
the Lord and trust every hour in his infinite love 
to keep us from sin. 

Dr. Talmage used to tell a little story of an 
experience meeting held in Louisville, Kentucky, 
that points a lesson. It was a meeting in which 
were related a great many most enthusiastic ex- 
periences. A man rose up and said : "I am a ship 
steaming right ahead for glory. I can tell ye I 
am going along at a spanking pace, and soon ex- 
pect to enter the blessed haven of eternal felicity." 
Another man, as though he intended to outdo the 
last speaker, followed him by saying: "Yes, 
friends, like our brother who has just sat down, 



116 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

I also am a ship in full sail, steaming straight 
and fast for the heavenly shore. I am going along 
at the rate of forty knots an hour, and soon shall 
hail the mountain tops of Imnianuel's land." An 
aged sister who was present, and whose experience 
of Christian life extended over many years, arose 
and said : "Well, you are all getting along mighty 
fast. I've been a-going to heaven for seventy 
years, and I have had to walk all the way, and 
have often stumbled and fallen, but have got up 
again, and if I ever get there at all I expect I'll 
have jest to walk the rest of the way. As to you 
men who are going so fast, all I've got to say is 
that if you get to going much faster you'll bust 
your bilers, and never get there at all." Alas! 
we have all of us seen too many wrecks along the 
way where exploded boilers have done their havoc 
in the church and out of it. "Let him that 
thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." 

But human life is like the pendulum of a 
clock, and we are always swinging from one ex- 
treme to the other. So our text suggests to us an 
insidious delusion of the evil one which is likely 
to come to us when we are tempted and beset. 
Satan tries to make us feel that our temptations 
are singular and peculiar, that really we are not 
treated right by the Lord in that he has permitted 



THE PKOMISED ESCAPE 



117 



us to be so beset. But Paul assures us that this 
is a falsehood of the enemy of our souls. Our 
temptation is not peculiar; it is common to man, 
and shall not be greater than we can bear. 

There is infinite comfort in the assurance of 
our text that God will never suffer any of us who 
trust him to be tempted beyond what we are able 
to bear, and that in every temptation he will make 
a way for our escape. There would not be the 
same comfort in it if it were left to us to make 
the way of escape ; that would not be fair, because 
some surpass others in intelligence and would 
have more wit in devising means to escape. But if 
God makes the way, then there is no excuse, for 
it will be as sufficient for one as for another. The 
way is prepared; it is for us to avail ourselves 
of it. 

It is interesting to note some of the ways God 
makes for our escape in time of temptation. 

First, God makes a way of escape by command- 
ing us to flee from the presence of the temptation. 
Paul commands, in one of his letters, "Flee youth- 
ful lusts," and Joseph illustrated that same way 
of escape by running from the presence of the 
tempter. The writer of Proverbs applies the same 
doctrine in the case of the temptations to strong 
drink. His word is, "Look not thou upon the wine 



118 THE GEE AT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

when it is red." Keep out of sight of it. It is in 
harmony with the Lord's Prayer where it teaches 
us to pray, "Lead us not into temptation." What 
folly it is to pray that prayer and then go at once 
where we shall be knowingly tempted. If God 
has prepared the way of flight, and we feel that 
there are certain associations and circumstances 
that always tempt us to do evil, then there is no 
safety but to keep away from those circumstances 
and those associations. And if we continue to go 
into danger after we know the danger and how 
to escape from it, our blood will be on our own 
heads. I have no doubt that this word goes 
straight to some consciences here. You have been 
tempted, fearfully tempted, and in the depths of 
your soul you have heard the command to fly. 
Dear friends, it is flee or die. Flee from the 
association that means death, though in doing so 
you pluck out a right eye and cut off a right hand. 
It is better to enter into heaven maimed than to 
lose your soul and fail of the great purpose of 
living. 

Second, God opens the way of escape from 
temptation by strengthening us through fellow- 
ship and communion with Christ. A lady went 
on one occasion through a terrible winter storm 
to see a flower show. And when she reached the 



THE PROMISED ESCAPE 



119 



place she passed in one moment out of the fierce 
storm, with its deep snow and cutting wind, into 
a marvelous hall, filled with hyacinths, tulips, 
jonquils, azalias, roses, and orchids. So it is the 
privilege of Christian men and women, on the 
busiest and most trying day that can possibly come, 
to pass in a moment from the temptations and 
struggles of life into the sweet fellowship of 
Christ, and through communion with him find 
grace to help in every time of need. There is 
nothing like this precious fellowship with Jesus 
Christ to strengthen a soul against temptation. 

Many of you remember the story of the Taj 
Mahal at Agra in India. The story tells of Shah 
Jehan and his beautiful bride. Seven times she 
went down to the mysterious land of motherhood 
and came back each time with a babe ; the eighth 
time the babe came back alone. Shah Jehan had 
promised her, sitting in the glorious garden at 
Agra, that he would build for her the most beau- 
tiful palace the world had ever known. Now, 
when his loved wife was brought back to the 
garden, he said: "My Mumtaz Mahal, you shall 
have your palace ; although it shall be your tomb." 
He now lies beside her. He put this inscription 
on her tomb: "To the memory of an undying 
love." Dr. E. S. McArthur tells how on a recent 



120 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

visit to the Taj Mahal he stood beneath that mar- 
velous dome and pronounced aloud the inscrip- 
tion : "To the memory of an undying love." And 
then he listened, as the word love ! love ! love ! re- 
verberated. It seemed as though the echo went 
to heaven, and came back to earth, softly rolling 
around the walls. Then softer and sweeter it 
went to heaven again, and then returned to earth, 
until his eyes were moist and his heart was 
tender. And so, my dear friends, if we would rise 
triumphant over temptation we must be ourselves 
living temples glorified by the love and com- 
munion we have with Jesus Christ, our Saviour, 
so that our lives echo and reecho with reverence 
and thanksgiving and love for God. 

There is no one of you whose life is so busy or 
is filled with such grimy toil but that you may 
escape in the hour of your temptation by this 
divine communion. Downtown, in a great city, 
there was a big four-horse truck which had on the 
dashboard in bright letters the words "My 
Darling." One day there was a street blockade, 
and an observer noted that though the driver of 
this strangely named truck looked as unsenti- 
mental as possible, he was not profane, or brutal 
to his horses, nor did he show any anger toward 
his fellow teamsters. Patiently he waited the 



THE PROMISED ESCAPE 



121 



loosening of the jam, while his neighbors filled 
the air with curses. Finding his horses restive, 
he climbed from his box and soothed them with 
gentle words and caresses. The man who was 
looking on asked him why he called his truck 
"My Darling." This was his reply: 

"Well, because it keeps the memory of my 
daughter, little ^Nellie, before me. She's dead 
now, but before she died she put her arms about 
my neck, and said : 'Papa, I am going to die, and 
I want you to promise me one thing: please 
promise me you will never swear any more, nor 
whip your horses hard, and that you will be kind 
to mamma.' That's all there is about it, mister; 
I promised my little girl, and I've kept my word." 

When the blockade was lifted this truckman re- 
sumed his seat and was soon lost in the tide of 
travel. If the memory of the promise to his little 
girl could save the big truckman from the tempta- 
tion to swear and give way to brutal passion, how 
much more the living fellowship with Jesus 
Christ our Saviour ! 

Many years ago a good woman in a little village 
was accustomed to go out at the close of the day 
into a quiet corner of her garden and spend a 
time in prayer and loving communion with Christ. 
Some rude boys found it out and annoyed her at 



122 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

her devotions. It was that which caused her to 
write a little hymn which has found its way into 
all the hymn books. It begins : 

"I love to steal awhile away 

From every cumbering care, 
And spend the hours of setting day 
In humble, grateful prayer." 

That mother's son became one of the greatest 
missionaries to Japan, and her hymn and work 
will live forever. She knew where to find com- 
fort in the hour of temptation. The same way of 
escape is open to us. 

Third, there is still another way by which God 
gives us escape from temptation, and that is by 
inspiring us to give ourselves with such devotion 
to work for our fellow men that we are relieved 
from the pressure of temptation. Paul had this 
in his mind when, in his letter to the Galatians, 
he wrote, "This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, 
and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh." The 
teaching of that is very evident. If you will keep 
yourself from being tempted to meanness, fill 
yourself with positive and earnest goodness. If 
you would save yourself from becoming miserly, 
open your purse and your hands to loving gen- 
erosity in the service of others. If you would 
save yourself from being tempted to any sin, give 



THE PEOMISED ESCAPE 



123 



yourself in the strength of God and in the fellow- 
ship of Jesus Christ to the life of the Spirit, in 
doing the kind of work which Jesus Christ did 
when he was here on earth and which we are sure 
he would be doing if he were here now. Are you 
tempted to worldliness ? Then give yourself to 
spiritual service in behalf of your neighbors, and 
as you thus use the gifts and -the privileges God 
has given you, you will soon find that the old 
temptations to selfishness which once troubled you 
no longer harass your path. 



124 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



XII 

God's Promised Delight in His Children 

The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he 
will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will 
rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing. — 
Zephaniah iii t 17. 

It is a common thing for us to talk about God 
giving us happiness and comfort, but I am sure it 
would be a wholesome thing if we thought more 
of the gladness which we may give to God. As 
has been often said, Happiness is never caught 
by the man who chases her. If she comes at all, 
she comes as a reward of merit to one whose heart 
and soul is given up to goodness and duty. Some 
one has sung : 

"While I sought Happiness she fled 

Before me constantly. 
Weary, I turned to Duty's path, 

And Happiness sought me, 
Saying, 'I walk the road to-day: 
I'll bear thee company.' " 

So it is that our own happiness and prosperity in 
life are wrapped up with the happiness of God. 
If our lives are such that they give gladness to 



god's delight m his children 125 

God, it cannot but be true tbat the music of that 
joy shall sound also in our own hearts and lives. 
Let us study, then, some of the ways in which we 
may beyond question give gladness to our heavenly 
Father. 

The first of these I want to mention is upright- 
ness of conduct. David in his wonderful tribute 
to God in the twenty-ninth chapter of First 
Chronicles says, "I know also, my God, that thou 
triest the heart, and hast pleasure in uprightness." 
And Solomon, his son, many years later, said, 
a They that are of a froward heart are abomina- 
tion to the Lord : but such as are upright in their 
way are his delight." We may be sure that we do 
not please God unless we are upright. If our 
ways are crooked and dishonest and unreliable, 
God cannot be happy about us; but if we are 
upright, standing in righteousness, God takes 
pleasure in us. 

Perhaps the most remarkable opal in the world 
was recently imported into this country. The 
opal is remarkable not only for its size and its 
unusual beauty, rich in color and fire, but be- 
cause it is evidently an opalized fossil. It takes 
only a glance at the opal to see that it is an 
opalized vertebra, or, in other words, a piece of 
backbone, which has through God's processes of 



126 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

nature become a most splendid jewel. Scientific 
men do not understand how it came about ; but in 
any event it is true to the scriptural suggestion 
that upright men and women who have sanctified 
backbones which hold them faithful for true liv- 
ing are the most precious jewels of God, in which 
he takes constant delight. 

We need to be forever laying the emphasis upon 
this question of uprightness, for I doubt if there 
be any point where we are tempted so terribly. 
Saint James says: "He that wavereth is like a 
wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. 
For let not that man think that he shall receive 
anything of the Lord." That is saying in one 
way that a wavering man, a man with a jelly back- 
bone, that can never be relied on to stand up 
straight for righteousness, is an impossible char- 
acter; even Almighty God cannot do anything for 
him. And there is nothing that ought to hold our 
attention so much as to seek by the grace of God 
to build up will-power for righteousness in our- 
selves. There is no point where we ought to brace 
our children so much as at the point of self-reliant 
energy, developing in them that sort of steadfast 
spinal column that may be depended upon to stand 
upright against the wind and do the right thing. 
And the best way that any parent can do this is to 



god's delight in his childbed 127 

live that kind of a life before his children and the 
world. After Henry Ward Beecher became a 
famous man, and was looking back over his career, 
seeking for the one who had given him the strong- 
est inspiration for life, he found that the per- 
sonality that had helped him most was his father. 
It was no special care that his father gave him. 
He was, his son declared, with a touch of sadness, 
"too busy to be loved"; it was the life he lived 
before his children, day by day, that taught them 
a lesson they never forgot. "I never once/' said 
Mr. Beecher, speaking of their bitter Eew Eng- 
land winters, "saw him flinch before the cold, or 
look as if anything was hard, or as if there was a 
reason for not pitching in and holding on when 
things were difficult. . . . Never was the snow 
so deep, or wind so high, or rain so driving, or 
night so black that the thought seemed to enter 
his head he must give up a meeting. He would 
take out his old silk handkerchief and put it on, 
and go forth into the storm without seeming to 
dread it, and as often as I have remembered it I 
have wished that I could put on his spirit the same 
way. He did it as a matter of course. And such 
was the effect of his example upon his children 
that there was not one of them that would not be 
ashamed to show the white feather in the presence 



128 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

of external difficulties. Hymns, texts, catechisms, 
never influenced me, but a great many things 
which my father did, but which neither he nor 
any one else ever spoke of, have had an influence 
upon my whole life. ... I had an ideal of 
what a man should be and should do." To live a 
life like that, that stands in the place of God to 
the boys and girls about us, as well as to men and 
women, is to live a life which God will rejoice 
over. 

Another thing in our lives which gives joy to 
God is reverence. The psalmist says, "The Lord 
taketh pleasure in them that fear him." Of 
course, that does not mean any slavish fear. It is 
the same kind of fear that is mentioned in an- 
other place which says, "The fear of the Lord is 
the beginning of wisdom." It is that kind of 
fear which is born of love and admiration. It is 
the kind of fear that a little child who is full of 
tenderest love has for father or for mother. A 
cross look, a harsh tone of voice from either one 
of them, will bring more trouble into the little 
heart than the frowns and reproofs of all the 
world besides. It is because there is in that little 
heart that noblest kind of fear which is born of 
love, and which we call reverence. The parents 
delight in the child who is animated by that 



god's delight m his childeen 129 

spirit. Nothing ever makes the true father or 
mother so glad down in the depths of the soul, so 
that their hearts rest in the deep consciousness of 
love, as when that spirit is revealed by their chil- 
dren. So God, who is the infinite Father, whose 
pity is like a father's, whose comforting touch is 
like a mother's, rejoices and sings over us with 
gladness when our thoughts and our lives are full 
of reverent love. 

We give gladness to God when we are inspired 
with hope in him. It is the psalmist again who 
says, "The Lord taketh pleasure ... in those 
that hope in his mercy." Can you imagine any- 
thing more uncomfortable to a really noble- 
hearted and generous parent than to have a child 
continually going around down-hearted and de- 
pressed and hopeless for fear his father and 
mother may not be good to him ? True, they al- 
ways have been good to him; he has always had 
plenty to eat and wear; all his necessities have 
been met, and there have been a great many un- 
expected good times and rich gifts; but, notwith- 
standing all the past, he goes around continually 
whining and repining, saying, gloomily, "I am 
afraid father and mother are going to forget me, 
and I'll soon be out at the knees and shall not 
have enough to eat." Would it not be humiliat- 
9 



130 THE GKEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

ing to the parent ? How would it be possible for 
the father and mother to sing with joy and con- 
gratulate one another when they talk of that 
child ? My dear friends, is it not true that some 
who hear this have been living just such a life as 
that complaining child ? In a way you have been 
trying to be Christians, and you have a sort of 
faint hope that you will get to heaven after a 
while, but you are going through life looking at 
the black side of things, always fearful, often 
complaining, with no cheer in your heart and no 
cheer in your face. Is it possible that you are 
giving God any joy ? How can God set the angels 
to singing when he thinks of you? Come, my 
friend, cheer up ! God, who has always been good 
to his children, who is infinitely more merciful 
than any father you ever knew, will not stain his 
whole record by treating you meanly. Let your 
hope take wing and let your cheerful heart cause 
God to rejoice. 

Meekness is also given as one of the causes of 
God's joy in his children. The psalmist says, 
"The Lord taketh pleasure in his people: he will 
beautify the meek with salvation." That word 
"meek" has not been very popular in our time, 
or perhaps in any time. It seems to run straight 
against the grain of sinful human nature. David 



GOD'S DELIGHT IN" HIS CHILDBED 131 

Hume, the infidel historian, said, "Nothing car- 
ries a man through the world like a true, genuine, 
natural impudence." Over against that Jesus 
Christ said, "Blessed are the meek : for they shall 
inherit the earth." And as rapidly as the Chris- 
tian ideal of life gains on the mind and heart of 
the world the meek man who wins through gentle- 
ness instead of brute force, who stands aggressive- 
ly for righteousness but in a spirit of sympathy 
and kindness toward all men — indeed, the Christ- 
man, with a moral backbone that is invincible, 
with aggressive force that is explosive, and yet 
with a compassion and sympathy and a gentleness 
which is the wonder of the ages — becomes the man 
of power. This is the life that is pleasing to God. 
God help us to live it ! 

God rejoices over the 'prayerful life. The 
writer of the book of Proverbs says, "The sacrifice 
of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord : but 
the prayer of the upright is his delight." There 
are many things we can never understand except 
by keeping in mind the words God uses about him- 
self in his relation to us. To the true parent noth- 
ing is more satisfying to the heart than that a 
loving and obedient child should ask for the things 
needed when the parent is able to bestow them. 
And to a loving father who had abundance to give 



132 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

his children it would cause real distress if he 
knew that his child was trying to do without, and 
doing so with discomfort and self-denial, rather 
than ask the father for what he needed. It would 
be not less discomforting to have his child fail to 
appreciate the things of life which the father re- 
gards as of the greatest importance, so that the 
boy never asks for anything because he does not 
feel the need of anything of value. 

I noted the story recently of a young fellow in 
the West who had always been poor, though he 
owned a piece of land. Some mineral discovery 
in the neighborhood made his land unexpectedly 
valuable. He sold ten acres of his farm for five 
thousand dollars, and received a check on the bank 
in payment. When he presented it at the bank 
the teller asked him if he did not wish to leave the 
money on deposit. 

"No," he said, "I want the cash." 

"If you are not going to use it you could leave 
it on deposit, and get it whenever you wished. 
The bank will pay you interest for the use of it." 

"Give me the money." 

"As it is a large amount, I suppose you will 
take it in fifty or one-hundred-dollar bills V 9 

"What would I do with hundred-dollar bills? 
I could never get them changed, I am going to 



god's delight iet his childeeit 133 

use the money. Give me them in fives; that's 
large enough." 

Seeing that he was an ignorant man, and very 
stubborn, the teller knew it would be useless to 
reason any longer with him, and proceeded to 
count out five thousand dollars. The fives were 
made up in packages of five hundred dollars, 
hence he piled up ten packages on the counter in 
front of the young man. 

"What's all this for?" he said, staring at the 
pile. 

"It's for you — five thousand dollars." 

"All that ! Well, say, give me three dollars out 
of it, and keep the rest till I call for it." 

I fear that some people's prayers are like that. 
There is no sense of that steady need which draws 
upon the Bank of Heaven every day, and every 
hour of the day, for the blessings which sustain 
the spirit and strengthen the heart for holy living. 
It is impossible that God can rejoice over us 
when we treat with such disrespect his glorious 
provisions for our spiritual life. If you want to 
make the heart of God glad you must draw on him 
every day for all the needs of your spiritual 
nature. If we are narrow, and jealous, and en- 
vious, and bigoted, it is our own fault; for there 
is grace enough in the Bank of Heaven, placed 



134 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

there to our credit through the atonement of Jesus 
Christ our Saviour, to transform us into men and 
women that God can sing over with infinite joy. 

Finally, God rejoices over the repenting soul. 
Jesus assures us that "There is joy in the presence 
of the angels of God over one sinner that repent- 
eth." And in that wonderful parable of the 
prodigal it was not the prodigal that had all the 
happiness when he got back to his father's house. 
!N"o, the father was glad also. He filled the house 
with merriment and feasting and music because, 
he said, "This my son was dead, and is alive again ; 
he was lost, and is found." It may be that I speak 
to some who cannot remember that for many years 
they have given any joy to God. You have grieved 
his Spirit; you have broken his commandments; 
you have gone far from him. Turn about to-day, 
and come back, and give him joy ! 



AN UNCHANGEABLE SAVIOUR 135 



XIII 

The Promise of an Unchangeable Saviour 
(a watch-night sermon) 

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and for- 
ever. — Hebrews xiii, 8. 

Before emphasizing the deeper significance of 
the text as a whole, I wish to ring the changes on 
the three tenses suggested by these three charac- 
terizations of time. They are the natural sug- 
gestions of the hour as we come in this watch-night 
service to the closing moments of the old year, 
looking forward to the beginning of the new year. 

First, we have to do with yesterday. It is much 
in our mind to-night. To those of us who have 
reached middle age it seems a very brief time in- 
deed since we were here on a similar occasion a 
year ago. Springtime, summer, autumn, and 
winter have passed since then, a full round twelve 
months, and yet so rapidly that it seems like a 
dream. That yesterday holds much for us of 
gladness and sorrow, of victory and defeat, of 
achievement and failure. It holds some things 
that we would not lose out of our memory for the 



136 THE GKEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

world, things precious for us to meditate upon, 
and it holds other things that we would gladly blot 
out if we could. But good or bad, happy or sor- 
rowful, bright or dark, our yesterday has passed 
beyond our reach. It would be just as easy for us 
to reach back and pick up one of the yesterdays in 
the days of JSTapoleon, or further back into the 
days of Abraham, and change its deeds, as it 
would to change one smile, or one word, or one 
single act which has occurred in the yesterday of 
our last year. As Pilate said when they wanted 
him to change the title which he put over the cross 
of Jesus, "What I have written I have written," 
so the record of our yesterday is made up and we 
cannot change it if we would. What we have 
written we have written. 

But while it is impossible for us to go back in 
our yesterday and change it, our yesterday pur- 
sues us with its insidious influence and presumes 
to dictate to us what we shall do to-day. We can- 
not escape from our yesterday. It manages to slip 
through the door which closes on the old year 
and come into the new year with us. You may 
open the door ever so quickly and slip through 
ever so silently, but your yesterday will come 
through with you. You might as well attempt to 
escape your shadow when the sun is shining high 



AN UNCHANGEABLE SAVIOUR 137 

and clear in the heavens as to attempt to escape 
from the shadow of your yesterday. It is one of 
the serious things of living that we gather by de- 
grees a tremendous current from the past. This 
is one of the momentous facts — the great impor- 
tance of character. A man came to me one day 
with the fountains of the great deep of his soul 
broken up. He had been a wicked man and for 
his sins he was suffering untold agony. The flood 
of his sinful life had wrought havoc with all that 
was dear to him. He abominated his sins; he 
loathed them; he looked on a good clean life as a 
traveler who has been lost in the desert looks on 
the oasis with its fruit-bearing palms, its green, 
sloping hillsides, and its springs of water. Just 
to have the privilege of being a good man seemed 
to him to be the fairest heaven ever dreamed of; 
and yet he sobbed and cried as he said, "It is im- 
possible. My yesterday, my past, my past, is a 
millstone around my neck, that drags me down to 
hell. I try to escape, but there never was a deer 
more relentlessly, more cruelly, pursued by the 
hounds than I am pursued by my past." That 
man had learned that his yesterday was not easy 
to shut out. 

A good yesterday is as keen in the pursuit as a 
bad one. A good character is as full of good 



138 THE GEE AT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

treasures as a bad one is of evil mortgages. A 
good yesterday will not be left behind ; it will fol- 
low us witb all its Habits of righteousness, with all 
its cultivated and developed current of benevo- 
lence and kindness and good-will; it will come 
with blessing out of our yesterday into our to-day. 

Some of us look back upon occurrences in our 
yesterday that will forever stand up as monu- 
ments of the mercy of God. Captain Holm, one 
of the great sea captains of our time, had crossed 
the Atlantic Ocean many times without losing a 
spar; but at last his ship was struck by lightning 
in mid-ocean. The bolt came down the mizzen- 
mast, through the cabin, and passed into the hold, 
leaving a long black scar on the mast as it went. 
The ship was loaded with cotton, and the captain 
had every reason to fear the horrors of a ship on 
fire at sea. But the Lord in his mercy spared the 
vessel, and she came safely to port. When, a little 
later, workmen came on board to make some re- 
pairs, the captain went into the cabin one day just 
as the painter was raising his brush to paint out 
the lightning mark on the mast. "Stop ! stop !" he 
said ; "don't you put a brush full of paint on that 
mast. So long as I am master of this ship that 
scar on the mast shall stand, so that I may never 
forget how good the Lord was to save us when my 



AN UNCHANGEABLE SAVIOUR 139 



cotton-loaded ship was struck by lightning." 
Some of us look back during the last year on scars 
like that, which tell of the mercy of God to us in 
that he hath spared us, and to-night we give him 
thanks, and we face the future with braver hearts 
and larger hope and nobler courage because of 
them. 

It is impossible that any one of us should begin 
the new year as though we had not lived before. 
'That would be infinitely wasteful, and that is not 
God's plan. God is economical. He is not stingy, 
but he does not waste. There is always abun- 
dance ; there are always floods of light and shower, 
and blessed influences to comfort body and soul; 
but nature teaches us wonderful economy, and 
God will not throw away your past. It stands 
godfather to your present. Good or bad, our to- 
day is what our yesterday made it. But, thank 
God, to-day may he a miracle-working time. 

John Kuskin took for his great life motto the 
simple word "To-day." He had it engraved on 
his watch, and before him in his library, so that 
he could always see as he sat at his desk the text, 
"Work while it is yet called to-day." Think of the 
infinite possibilities of to-day. Was yesterday 
sinful as you look back upon it ? Does it haunt 
you with the fact that it stands under the con- 



140 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

demnation of God ? Then to-day you may repent 
and through faith in Jesus Christ you may be for- 
given. You cannot lay it up, that privilege of 
repentance, and say that some other time you will 
avail yourself of it; that is presumptuous folly, 
and you have no Scripture nor philosophy nor 
logic to bear you out in it. But to-day is your 
own, and now is the day of salvation, and you 
have the assurance that though your sins are as 
crimson or as scarlet, through repentance and con- 
fession and faith in Jesus Christ they may be- 
come as white as wool or snow. You cannot make 
yesterday white, but you may make to-day white 
by the grace of God. You may start a new cur- 
rent, a new stream of tendency in your life, so 
that if to-morrow ever becomes to-day, your yes- 
terday will help you and not curse you. 

To-day you may serve God; you may seek to 
know his will with such earnestness and sim- 
plicity that the Spirit of God will speak to you 
and give peace to your soul. To-day you may 
serve your fellow men. To-day you may hold 
back the hot word that leaps to your tongue; you 
may quell the anger that springs up in your heart ; 
you may pray for your enemies; you may for- 
give those who have injured you; you may be 
patient and forbearing with those who try you; 



AN UNCHANGEABLE SAVIOUR 141 



yes, to-day you may make men see Christ live 
again in the loving spirit of your life. To-day 
yon may visit the sick; you may give bread to 
the hungry ; you may minister to the poor and the 
unfortunate; you may seek out those who are in 
trouble; you may forget yourself in bearing the 
burdens of the weak and in sympathizing with 
those who are in sorrow. To-day you may follow 
your Master, "who went about doing good." O, 
what a yesterday you may make out of to-day ! 

To-day you may win men to Christ. To-day 
you may seek out the little boy or the little girl 
who has been forgotten ; take an interest in them, 
win their friendship, until their hearts look up 
to you as a flower does to the sun, and then bring 
them to Jesus. Anybody that will be patient and 
sympathetic and persistently kind can win the 
heart of a child, and then win it to Jesus; and, 
O, what a glory it is to win a child to Jesus! 
You may do that to-day. You may tell your 
neighbor about Jesus to-day; it may be too late 
to-morrow, but to-day it is possible. There is the 
man who works in your shop; there is a relative 
over whom you have influence ; you may speak to 
them about Jesus to-day. God only knows if there 
will be any chance afterward, but to-day you may 
tell them about Jesus. 



142 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

But as we wait here to-night we are watching 
for the morning. We hope and fear for a great 
many things about it, hut we know nothing. As 
Joseph Parker says, we are blind with regard to 
the future; it is as if we had no wisdom at all; 
we may not boast of to-morrow, because we know 
not what one day may bring forth. We know the 
history of the day that is gone, but what is com- 
ing in the morning not the wisest man can tell. 
God keeps to-morrow in his own hand; but this 
we know: If we obey God we shall be led and 
upheld and comforted; our perplexity shall be 
relieved, the crooked places shall be made straight, 
the rough places made plain, and even the valleys 
shall be exalted ; a new song will be in our mouth 
at the close of the day : if we have to sing of judg- 
ment, we shall also have to sing of mercy, for 
God's way toward us is one of judgment and love. 

Some time ago an Australian paper reported 
that in New Zealand a bank on wheels had been 
instituted. A clerk traveled in the carriage, and 
was provided with a wallet containing a supply of 
money, and wherever the bank was customers were 
in the habit of depositing their money or doing 
business as occasion required. So it is with our 
bank of faith in God. If we trust God we enter 
the new year with the assurance that we may 



AN UNCHANGEABLE SAVIOTTE 



143 



draw from his mighty store under whatever cir- 
cumstances we may be placed. 

There is only one proper attitude for us to as- 
sume as we face to-morrow, and that is here and 
now, while it is to-day, to make sure that we are 
right with God, and face to-morrow, which is all 
uncertain, with the full determination that by 
God's help we will do our whole duty. That is 
more important than anything else about our 
future. It is more important than the question 
as to whether we shall live through the next year 
or not. When the Roman general, Pompey, was 
warned against the danger of his returning from 
Egypt to Italy, to meet a new trouble in his own 
land, his heroic answer was : "It is a small matter 
that I should move forward and die. It is too 
great a matter that I should take one step back- 
ward and live." We cannot afford to hold even 
life itself at the price of doing wrong. Life is 
only valuable when we are using it to serve the 
will of God. It is a terrible thing to deliberately 
go out of the old year and into the new knowing 
that we are not right with God. 

A gentleman crossing the English Channel 
stood near to the helmsman. It was a calm and 
pleasant evening, and no one dreamed of a pos- 
sible danger to their good ship. But a sudden 



144 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



flapping of a sail, as if the wind had shifted, 
caught the ear of the officer on watch, and he 
sprang at once to the wheel, examining closely the 
compass. "You are a half -point oft* the course!'" 
he said sharply to the man at the wheel. The 
deviation was corrected, and the officer returned 
to his post. 

"You must steer very accurately," said the 
looker-on, "when only a half-point is so much 
thought of." 

"Ah ! half a point in many places might bring 
us directly on the rocks/' he said. 

So it is with our lives. Let us not dare go out 
of the old year a half -point wrong. To-day is the 
time to get right, by repentance of our sins and 
forgiveness through Jesus Christ our Saviour. 

It is possible for us to go out of the old year 
into the new with Jesus Christ as our companion. 
He is "the same yesterday, to-day, and forever." 
And we may have him as our guide through all 
the new year. He holds the keys of life, and if 
we keep close to him we shall walk in safety. A 
young girl walking out from the railroad station 
found a small key that had apparently fallen 
from some purse or key ring. As she picked it up 
she instinctively stopped to look for her own keys. 
Finding them safe, she gave a sigh of relief, and 



AST UNCHANGEABLE SAVIOUR 145 

went on her way. But the key in the street still 
held her thoughts. Were there not keys, invisible 
keys, to life itself, which were lost sometimes % 
Were not men and women lost because they had 
lost their keys s Jesus Christ holds the keys of 
life. He has been tempted in all points like as 
we are, yet without sin ; he holds the keys of life's 
experience; every door shall open to his touch, 
and we may walk with him in perfect peace, not 
only to-morrow, but the day after, and forever. 
10 



146 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



XIV 

The Peacemaker's Promise 

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called 
the children of God. — Matthew v, 9. 

Strange as it may seem, tlie pulpit in all ages, 
from the days of Jesus Christ until now, has had 
a vast deal more to say concerning the soldier, the 
warrior, the aggressive personality, than it has 
about the peacemaker. When I had it in mind to 
prepare this discourse I searched through a large 
library containing many thousands of sermons 
without finding a single sermon on the subject of 
the peacemaker. I do not remember, in all the 
listening to sermons that has ever come to me, to 
have heard a sermon on the subject. Of course, 
there have been many sermons preached in which 
the Beatitudes have been taken up one by one, and 
the peacemaker has had his turn ; but I have in- 
quired among a number of ministers, and all have 
assured me that they had never preached on the 
subject. And yet I am sure that there is great 
need for the peacemaker, and that he must need 
encouragement. 



THE PEACEMAKER^ PROMISE 147 



Jesus Christ himself was the first great peace- 
maker in the Christian era, and he is the one who 
speaks these words of praise and promise toward 
the peacemaker. Three suggestions in these words 
of Christ are worthy of our study. The first is 
the thought of the personality represented here. 
A certain character is pronounced "blessed" — the 
character of the peacemaker. Every man cannot 
say, "To-day I will rise up and go forth and be a 
peacemaker." A man cannot succeed as a peace- 
maker without first developing the proper char- 
acter for it. Character and life go together. The 
roots of life are in character, and there must be a 
certain soul culture, a certain mastery of the 
spirit, which makes it possible for a man to live 
the part of the peacemaker among his fellow men. 

For instance, it is not possible for a man to 
succeed as a peacemaker who has not learned to 
control his own temper. Strife is carried on or- 
dinarily by bitterness of spirit arising from the 
lack of self-control on the part of those connected 
with the strife. Now, if a man undertakes to 
bring peace to such strife, and is himself bitter 
and ungoverned in his temper, he will only make 
matters worse. This applies everywhere — among 
nations, in the differences between employers and 
employees, and in the control of families. Many 



148 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

parents utterly fail in the proper discipline and 
development of their children because they do not 
know how to control their own tempers. They 
make their children more passionate and more 
lawless because they undertake to subdue them in 
a passionate spirit. You would not think much 
of a fireman, though he had the best of motives 
and the most industrious spirit, who, in under- 
taking to put out a fire, would go running into 
the threatened building carrying a flaming torch 
of pitchwood in his hand wherever he went. Yet 
the man who undertakes to bring peace among 
warring factions or contending spirits without 
having the mastery and control of his own temper 
carries a firebrand which makes it certain that he 
will do more harm than good. The very first con- 
dition in the evolution of a peacemaker is the 
mastery of his own spirit. The man who is peace- 
ful and calm in his own heart, who holds his own 
temper in check, brings a quieting influence when- 
ever he comes into consultation, which at once 
paves the way for peace. Have you never tried, 
when you were much excited, stating your griev- 
ance to a person peculiarly well poised, and found 
that your grievance did not seem nearly so fla- 
grant after he had listened to it, though he may 
have said no word ? The magic of his self-control, 



the peacemaker's peomise 149 

somehow, took the sting out of it, and you were 
already in a better mood to respond to proposi- 
tions looking to peace. 

Henry M. Stanley, the most successful ex- 
plorer of modern times, speaking of his hard 
school of experience, says: "For myself I lay no 
claim to any exceptional fineness of nature. But 
I say that, beginning life as a rough, ill-educated, 
impatient man, I have found my schooling in 
these very African experiences. I have learned 
by actual stress of imminent danger that self-con- 
trol is more indispensable than gunpowder; and 
that persistent self-control is impossible without 
real, heartfelt sympathy." If Stanley had not 
acquired the power of self-control he could never 
have been the peacemaker he was on a thousand 
occasions where his success and his life depended 
upon it ; and you and I cannot be the blessing we 
ought to be to the worried and fretted and per- 
plexed men and women whom we meet amid the 
experiences of every day without learning the 
great lesson of the mastery of our tempers. 

There is another thing akin to that, and that is 
the mastery of the tongue. We must not only 
master the temper, but we must learn to hold our 
tongues and compel them to not speak unless they 
speak the words of wisdom and kindness. ~No 



150 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

man can be a peacemaker who lets his tongue run 
riot. The greatest incendiary in this world is an 
uncontrolled tongue — that is, a tongue uncon- 
trolled by the spirit of Jesus Christ. James, with 
those keen figures of his that are sharp as saber 
thrusts, says : "The tongue is a little member, and 
boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter 
a little fire kindleth ! And the tongue is a fire, a 
world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our 
members, that it defileth the whole body, and 
setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set 
on fire of hell. For every kind of beasts, and of 
birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is 
tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: but the 
tongue can no man tame ; it is an unruly evil, full 
of deadly poison." And that is true of the human 
tongue wherever it is not mastered by the law of 
love. !N"o man or woman can be a peacemaker 
who goes about talking carelessly. It does not 
need that they have any deep malice, and go 
around slandering people with a deliberate pur- 
pose to do harm in the world. It is only necessary 
that they let silly, unruled tongues waggle to do 
the devil's business of stirring up strife, of separa- 
ting friends, poisoning the life-blood of good will in 
church or social life. If we are to be peacemakers, 
we must learn to hold our tongues and master 



THE PEACEMAKER'S PROMISE 151 

them so that they shall not speak except under the 
direction of the spirit of love. 

!Now, if we have that kind of a personality, 
mastering our own tempers and our own tongues 
by the aid of the great Peacemaker, then we are 
able to enter the lists for this great blessing prom- 
ised to the peacemakers. If we have attained to 
that self-mastery we have the character, and we 
are now ready by the grace of God to act the part. 

In the work of the peacemaker it is very essen- 
tial that we shall hold ourselves rigidly to the 
charitable consideration of the faults of other 
people. We need to remember that while there is 
no one in this world without flaws and imperfec- 
tions, no one perfectly good, so there is no one 
perfectly bad, no one as bad as he might be. 
And so in dealing with the very worst people we 
shall cruelly misjudge them if we put the worst 
construction on their motives or on their conduct. 
If that is true in dealing with the worst, how much 
more true in dealing with people who are more 
than fairly good, the people whom we meet in our 
homes and in our church and in the ordinary af- 
fairs of our daily life. If we put the worst con- 
struction on their conduct in our judgment of 
them, we are constantly slandering them in our 
thoughts — and, if we speak our thoughts, in our 



152 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

words. Children are often discouraged in trying 
to be good because a construction which they never 
dreamed of is put upon their motives. They are 
made to seem so much worse than they really are 
that they are disheartened and give up to the 
temptation to be bad. If we are going to act as 
peacemakers we must put the best construction on 
the faults of others, and in that way we shall come 
into sympathetic touch with anyone who is in the 
wrong. They will feel our kindness and our 
sense of justice, and nine people out of ten will 
respond to it. 

The peacemaker must know the value of time. 
There is no place where promptness counts for 
more than in the undertaking to make peace be- 
tween people who have had a misunderstanding, 
for every moment counts when wicked tempers 
are aroused. What is only a little thing at first 
grows into a quarrel, and if allowed to run it 
grows into a feud, and many a time in the history 
of the world it has grown into a great war that has 
cost tens of thousands of human lives. And every 
bit of personal strife has these stages of evolution. 
The time to settle disagreements and misunder- 
standings is the moment you know about them. 
If it is your own case, and you know that some 
one feels vexed with you or hurt with you, go at 



THE PEACEMAKER'S PROMISE 153 



once in a spirit of love and concession and have it 
out. Let in the sunlight of a clear understanding, 
for a misapprehension allowed to fester and brood 
in the imagination will soon make a mountain out 
of a molehill. So if you would keep the peace 
among others, be prompt to begin at once, while 
it is a little thing and while it is still new. 

I stood upon the rim of the crater of Vesuvius 
on one occasion when it was in eruption and was 
throwing out large quantities of lava. When this 
lava first came into the air it would run like 
water, it was so yielding, but in the course of a 
few minutes it began to harden, and if left for a 
little while it would become like the hardest rock. 
So it is with strife between human beings. It is at 
first soft and yielding, and may be molded ; but if 
you let it alone it settles down into hate and 
prejudice that will do infinite harm and be almost 
impossible to remove. 

We have spoken of the character and the service 
of the peacemaker. We have yet to speak of his 
reward. Our Master says that he is a blessed 
character and he shall be called the child of God. 
That surely means that he is the child of God, for 
God never fails to call things by their right names. 
The world looks on the outside and often names 
people very differently from the name by which 



154: THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 



God knows them, since he looks at the heart and 
judges them with perfect wisdom. You remem- 
ber that prosperous farmer concerning whom Je- 
sus spoke, who was given up to the things of the 
world and was very successful. His fields were 
so fruitful and produced such enormous crops that 
he had no room to store away his harvests ; yet no 
thought of generosity came to him, no thought of 
sharing with others. He had no compassion and 
no sympathy for the poor because he had such 
abundance. The blessings of God only fattened 
his greed, and he said to himself and to his neigh- 
bors, "I will pull down my barns, and build 
greater ; and there will I bestow all my fruits and 
my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou 
hast much goods laid up for many years." No 
doubt through all the community this man was 
known as the rich man, the successful man, the 
happy man; but God had a different name for 
him, and that very night he blazed it forth before 
the man's astonished gaze as he said to him, "Thou 
fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." 
The world said, "Successful," "Rich," "Great," 
"Happy." God said, "Fool." And fool he was; 
for God named him correctly. 

There was a king in Babylon, very rich, very 
powerful, very successful in the eyes of all the 



THE PEACEMAKER'S PROMISE 155 



nations. His walls were thought to be invincible ; 
his armies made the earth afraid; his warehouses 
were full of treasure. He gave a great feast, and 
there were a thousand covers at the dinner. The 
rarest wines were drunk from the golden vessels 
from old temples ransacked and robbed. The 
courtiers shouted, and called him "the great 
King," "the Victor," "the Successful." But God 
had another name for him, and he sent a bodiless 
hand to write on the walls of the dining hall, 
"Thou art weighed in the balances, and found 
wanting." God called him "the Defeated." That 
night he was slain. 

God calls people by their right names, and Je- 
sus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they 
shall be called the children of God." There could 
be no sweeter promise than that we shall be named 
by our heavenly Father as his children. Paul 
enlarges on what that means. He says, "The 
Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that 
we are the children of God : and if children, then 
heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; 
if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be 
also glorified together." This is the very perfec- 
tion of reward, for better than any gift that might 
be bestowed upon us outward in its nature is the 
gift of personal relationship to God; to be 



156 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

adopted into his family, so that we are his heirs 
and are joint-heirs with Jesus. Then the love of 
Heaven toward Jesus Christ is turned toward us 
in equal measure. Did angels come to the garden 
of Gethsemane and into the wilderness of tempta- 
tion to comfort Jesus ? Then they shall come to 
us when we need them, and minister to us as the 
heirs of salvation. All fear shall be taken out of 
our hearts. For we are neither orphans nor 
slaves nor hired servants. We are the children 
of God. Let us sit at the feet of the great Peace- 
maker and acquire this glorious personality that 
we may enjoy its blessed reward. 



FOUR WHEELS OF DIVINE PROMISE 157 



XV 

The Four Wheels of Divine Promise 

I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will 
hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for 
a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; to 
open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the 
prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison 
house. — Isaiah xlii, 6, 7. 

Frances Bidley Havergal, the poet saint, 
whose songs breathe an atmosphere of Christian 
confidence unsurpassed by any writer outside of 
the Bible, used these words as her chariot of fire 
to bear her home. On the last day of her life she 
asked a friend to read her this forty-second chap- 
ter of Isaiah. When the friend had reached these 
verses which I have chosen for our text Miss 
Havergal stopped her. "Called, held, kept, used," 
she whispered. "Well, I will just go home on 
that." And she did go home on that, making it 
her celestial chariot, which no one doubts had 
abundant entrance through the pearly gates into 
the city of gold. 

I want to follow the analysis made by the dying 
poet. I am sure we shall find a sermon in it that 



158 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

will comfort our hearts and strengthen our faith 
in the promises of God. 

The first wheel of this celestial chariot is our 
divine calling. Every one of us has been called 
of God. There is something sublime about it, 
something which lifts life up out of the dirt and 
the smoke of earth and reminds us of our divine 
kinship. There is not one here whose life has 
been so worldly and so thoughtless of spiritual 
things but that you have been conscious at some 
period of your life, and some of you on many 
occasions, that you were divinely called to turn 
from your sin and serve God. You may have 
silenced the call in your conscience, and refused 
it, but the call came, and all its divine possibili- 
ties were within your reach, and in the great day 
of judgment, if you should find yourself shut out 
from heaven because of your sins, you could not 
say, "I had no chance, I was never called." In 
the clear light of that hour the memory of that 
call of God will come back to you and stand up in 
judgment against you. 

But are there not many who have heard God's 
call and responded to it who are tempted to forget 
the great honor that has come to them, and who 
live sometimes day after day without thinking 
much of the fact that the infinite God has spoken 



FOUE WHEELS OF DIVINE PEOMISE 159 

to them, and called them to the life of righteous- 
ness? Nothing kills love like indifference and 
thoughtlessness. Dr. Newman Hall compares the 
love that is in the soul of the Christian in re- 
sponse to God's call to a fire kindled from above. 
But the fire will soon go out unless we furnish 
the fuel. And the fuel on which this kind of 
fire feeds is meditation on the love of God, the 
worship of God, and the doing of those things 
which please him. But all the fuel one can put 
into a furnace only stifles it unless at the same 
time we admit the air, and the vitalizing air that 
keeps alive the flame of love in our hearts is the 
breath of constant prayer. Paul had this in his 
mind when he said to some people who had been 
called of God through his word that the secret of 
a happy and strong Christian was in "praying 
always with all prayer." 

Alexander Maclaren has this illustration for 
those who, having been called of God, are in 
danger of losing touch with him and falling back 
again into worldliness. He says that unless you 
put out your water- jars when it rains you will 
catch no water ; if you do not watch for God com- 
ing to help you, God's watching to be gracious will 
be of no good at all to you. His watching is not a 
substitute for ours ; but because he watches, there- 



160 THE GEEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

fore we should watch. Are you watching day by 
day for the presence of God in your life? Are 
you living worthy of that divine calling? 

The second wheel of this heavenly chariot is 
the divine holding. "I will hold thine hand." If 
God is not holding our hand and leading us it is 
our own fault. I saw a mother the other day 
leading her little child in the park. So long as 
the mother led it, it went safely. But finally it 
concluded that it wanted to get away from the 
mother's holding, though the mother held on quite 
persistently and spoke persuasively, seeking to 
make the little one content to leave its baby hand 
in hers. At last, however, with a sudden little 
gust of self-will, the child jerked its hand from 
the mother's, and ran down the walk ahead as fast 
as it could. It had not gone thirty feet before it 
fell and cried aloud with pain. So when God 
calls us and we respond to his call he takes our 
hand in his. He will never let go except our self- 
will takes it away. Do you ask why God does 
not hold on anyhow, whether we desire it or not ? 
If he were to do that we would be only slaves, not 
free men and women. But so long as we leave our 
hand in the divine hand he will hold fast, and 
we shall be divinely led. A blessed thing about 
God's leadership is that not only will he lead us 



FOUR WHEELS OF DIVINE PROMISE 161 

on the right path, and in safe ways, but he will 
lead lis into ever larger and more splendid per- 
sonality. I have seen many men and women 
who were of very little account while they were 
led by the evil one, but when they broke away 
from Satan's guidance and gave themselves up to 
be led by the divine hand they grew into intellect- 
ual and moral and spiritual beauty until it was 
hard to believe that they were the same persons 
who were so unlovable at the beginning. 

Dr. O. P. - GrifTord, speaking of the blessing 
which comes to a man who surrenders himself to 
the Holy Spirit, compares it to the development 
which has come to certain flowers through cultiva- 
tion. You go into a hothouse and you see a be- 
wildering mass of beauty. It is the season of 
chrysanthemums. The gardener talks to you 
about the evolution of the chrysanthemum. He 
says it started as a little daisy, and from it was 
evolved this beautiful flower. But how was it 
evolved % It was transferred to a hothouse built 
by a man, and the flower was tended by a man. 
The chrysanthemum is a daisy plus a man. Re- 
move the flower from the hothouse and the heat 
and soil, take away all the human element, and in 
ten years you will have a daisy. The chrysanthe- 
mum is a daisy plus a man, and the Christian is a 
11 



162 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

man plus God. All the beautiful graces that make 
some lives so glorious have been brought about 
through spiritual culture ; they have come through 
the yielding to God's guidance and leadership. 
What folly to willfully take our hands away from 
God's holding ! 

The third wheel of this heavenly chariot is the 
divine keeping. In another place Isaiah says in 
an address to God, "Thou wilt keep him in perfect 
peace whose mind is stayed on thee." This gives 
us the secret of God's keeping. It is not arbitrary, 
he will not keep us against our will; but if we 
lovingly stay our minds and hearts upon him noth- 
ing can ever take us out of his hand. The most 
wonderful illustrations that could possibly be used 
are used in the Bible to show us the safety of 
Christians who leave themselves in God's hands. 
The Christian is compared to the apple of the 
eye. As long as a man has life he will fight to 
protect the apple of his eye. It is the tenderest 
and most sensitive point. And yet we are assured 
that so long as we love and trust God we are as 
the apple of his eye to him. Again we are com- 
pared to the signet ring on the finger, and still 
again to precious jewels, which are always either 
worn or kept in the secret chamber, the personal 
treasure of the king. 



FOUR WHEELS OF DIVINE PROMISE 163 

But if we are to be thus related to God we must 
stay our hearts upou him in prayerful meditation. 
The danger point of our age is the lack of secret 
prayer. Busy, hard-worked people think they 
have no time for it ; but the fact is that the loss is 
so serious and sometimes so utterly fatal that we 
should make time for it. Better cut out the time 
anywhere else than there, for the very purpose we 
are living for on earth depends for its fulfillment 
on our being kept of God. Secret prayer alone 
can tone up a Christian to meet the stress of life 
bravely and patiently. 

Henry Ward Beecher says that he was one day 
with Mr. Hicks, the painter, when he saw on his 
table some high-colored stones, and he asked him 
what they were for. The artist said they were 
to keep his eye up to tone. When he was working 
in pigments, insensibly his sense of color was 
weakened, and by having a pure color near him 
he brought it up again; just as the musician by 
his tuning fork brings himself up to the right 
pitch. And so every day as Christians we need 
above everything else to come into sensible com- 
munion with the invisible God. None of us are 
so strong or so pure but that we need every day 
to be tuned, chorded, and borne up to the idea of 
a pure and lofty life. 



164 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 



Many here have found their personal experience 
described in those sweet lines of Father Byan in 
which he portrays his experience in the "Valley 
of Silence." 

"I walk down the Valley of Silence — 
Down the dim, voiceless valley — alone! 

And I hear not the fall of a footstep 
Around me, save God's and my own; 

And the hush of my heart is as holy 
As heaven when angels have flown. 

"Long ago was I weary of voices 

Whose music my heart could not win; 

Long ago was I weary of noises 
That fretted my soul with their din; 

Long ago was I weary of places 
Where I met but the human — and sin. 

"I walked in the world with the worldly; 

I craved what the world never gave; 
And I saidi 'In the world each Ideal 

That shines like a star on life's wave 
Is wrecked on the shores of the Real, 

And sleeps, like a dream, in a grave/ 

"And still did I pine for the Perfect; 

And still found the False with the True; 
I sought 'mid the Human for Heaven, 

But caught a mere glimpse of its blue; 
And I wept when the clouds of the Mortal 

Veiled even that glimpse from my view. 



EOTTK WHEELS OF DIVINE PROMISE 165 

"And I toiled on, heart-tired of the Human, 
And I moaned 'mid the mazes of men, 

Till I knelt, long ago, at an altar, 
And I heard a Voice call me. Since then 

I walk down the Valley of Silence 
That lies far beyond mortal ken. 

"Do you ask what I found in the Valley? 

'Tis my trysting-place with the Divine. 
And I fell at the feet of the Holy, 

And above me a voice said, 'Be Mine.' 
Then arose from the depth of my spirit 

An echo — 'My heart shall be Thine.' 

"Do you ask how I live in the Valley? 

I weep, and I dream, and I pray; 
But my tears are as sweet as the dewdrops 

That fall on the roses in May; 
And my prayer, like a perfume from censers, 

Ascendeth to God night and day. 

"In the hush of the Valley of Silence 

I dream all the songs that I sing; 
And the music floats down the dim Valley 

Till each finds a word for a wing, 
That to hearts, like the Dove of the Deluge, 

A message of peace they may bring. 

"But far on the deep there are billows 
That never shall break on the beach; 

And I have heard songs in the Silence 
That never shall float into speech; 

And I have had dreams in the Valley 
Too lofty for language to reach. 



166 THE GBEAT PEOMISES OE THE BIBLE 

"And I have seen thoughts in the Valley — 
Ah, me! how my spirit' was stirred! 

And they wear holy veils on their faces, 
Their footsteps can scarcely be heard; 

They pass through the Valley like virgins, 
Too pure for the touch of a word. 

"Do you ask me the place of the Valley, 
Ye hearts that are harrowed by care? 

It lieth afar between mountains, 
And God and his angels are there; 

And one is the dark mount of Sorrow, 
And one the bright mountain of Prayer." 

The fourth wheel of this heavenly chariot is in 
that we are divinely used. That is the highest 
honor God can put upon us. He honors us by 
using us. To be of use to the world is far greater 
than to be happy in it or successful, according to 
any worldly standard. In a cemetery not far 
from New York city there is a monument which 
attracts more attention than any other, which has 
on it this simple inscription, "To the Memory of 
Aunt Nell." This is the story: A poor woman, 
who lived in a humble little house, and who lived 
a very hard life, in spite of her poverty took a 
great interest in poor country boys, and whenever 
she found one sick or in hard luck she did in her 
simple way what she could to help him. One day 
a little lad, coming down with typhoid fever, laid 



FOUB WHEELS OF DIVIDE PROMISE 167 

his burning head on her doorstep. She took him 
in and ministered to him until he got well, and 
sent him away with her blessing. He was an un- 
promising little fellow, working at five dollars a 
month in a truck garden, but he went West and 
grew into a successful man. Not long ago he came 
back to hunt up the woman who had been good to 
him. He meant to make her happy for the rest 
of her life, and it is said that he sat down and 
sobbed like a child when he found that she was 
dead. So he went over into the cemetery and set 
up that marble stone to the memory of Aunt Nell, 
and across the top inscribed, "Erected by one to 
whom she was kind years ago." I don't suppose 
that white stone matters to the little woman, but 
the loving service which prompted it has been 
treasured up in God's heart. 

Is God using you ? The divinest spiritual in- 
sight, the noblest visions of life, will always come 
through service. As we let God use us we shall 
see all things with clearer eyes. I have heard the 
story of a minister who on Saturday night bent 
wearily over a half -finished sermon. There had 
been a domestic revolution, and the help had de- 
serted ; the weather was hot ; the minister was 
tired. As he worked hopelessly at his sermon, he 
heard in the chamber above a still more weary 



168 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

wife trying to soote a restless baby. The minister 
braced himself to his task, sure that his duty lay 
before him. But, yielding at last, he dropped his 
slow-moving pen, and going to the chamber above 
took the crying child. The exhausted mother fell 
asleep; and the child, feeling the soothing touch 
of the new hand, also fell asleep in the father's 
arms. Then, sitting in the peaceful stillness of 
the twilight, he found his sermon coming with a 
freshness and power which he had missed in his 
weary strife. So that which began as a wearisome 
sacrifice ended in refreshment and success. That 
experience is a parable of life. As we let God use 
us he is able to teach us things, lessons that we 
never can learn except in the atmosphere of serv- 
ice. We are always sure of coming in touch with 
Jesus when God uses us in service. Hear our text 
again: "I the Lord have called thee in righteous- 
ness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, 
and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a 
light of the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes, to 
bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them 
that sit in darkness out of the prison house." 
There is the way God wants to use us. The 
solemn question we want to ask to-day is whether 
we are giving ourselves to God to be thus used. 
God has called us. We want him to lead us and 



FOUR WHEELS OF DIVINE PROMISE 169 

keep us. We desire the comforts and the blessings 
of the Christian life. Are we giving ourselves to 
be used of God? I pray God that we may have 
this day a vision of Jesus, our divine Lord, and 
hear him as he questions us : 

"Have ye looked for sheep in the desert, 

For those who have missed their way? 
Have ye heen in the wild, waste places, 

Where the lost and the wandering stray? 
Have ye trodden the lonely highway, 

The foul and darksome street? 
It may be ye'd see in the gloaming 

The prints of My wounded feet. 

"Have ye folded home to your bosom 

The trembling, neglected lamb? 
And taught to the little lost one 

The sound of the Shepherd's name? 
Have ye searched for the poor and needy, 

With no clothing, no home, no bread? 
The Son of man was among them, 

He had nowhere to lay his head! 

"Have ye carried the living water 

To the parched and thirsty soul? 
Have ye said to the sick and wounded, 

'Christ Jesus makes thee whole'? 
Have ye told My fainting children 

Of the strength of the Father's hand? 
Have ye guided the tottering footsteps 

To the shores of the 'Golden Land'? 



THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



"Have ye stood by the sad and weary 

To smooth the pillow of death, 
To comfort the sorrow-stricken, 

And strengthen the feeble faith? 
And have ye felt when the glory 

Has streamed through the open door, 
And flitted across the shadows, 

That I had been there before? 

"Have ye wept with the broken-hearted 
In their agony of woe? 
Ye might hear Me whisp'ring beside you, 

'Tis a pathway I often go. 
My disciples, My brethren, My friends, 

Can ye dare to follow Me? 
Then, wherever the Master is dwelling, 
There shall the servant be." 



CONQUEST OF THE IMAGINATION 



171 



XYI 

The Promised Conquest of the Imagination 

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, 
but mighty before God to the casting down of strong- 
holds; casting down imaginations. — 2 Corinthians x, 
4, 5 (R. V.). 

Our theme is difficult because it belongs to the 
realm of the unseen and spiritual, whose priceless 
values are not easily measured. It is easy to 
weigh and measure gross material things. It is 
easy to tell what they will do under a given set of 
conditions. It is a simple matter to compute the 
force of a waterfall like Niagara, to draw off a 
portion of it, as has already been done, and to 
harness it down to the work of civilization. A 
bright engineer can readily calculate beforehand 
just how many spindles it will turn, how many 
canal boats it will drive, or how many trolley 
cars it will speed on their way, or how many towns 
a hundred miles distant it will light up. Given 
the weight of a cannon ball and the number of 
ounces of powder exploded behind it, it is not 
hard to tell through how many miles of space it 
will be hurled, and through how many feet of 



172 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

timber or inches of iron plating it will forge its 
way when it strikes. 

But when we undertake to weigh love, or hope, 
or fear, or ambition, or fancy, it is more difficult. 
Who could have foretold, for instance, how much 
vitality there would be left in David's Shepherd 
Psalm after being thrown across a gulf of forty 
centuries? Who could have foretold how much 
power would have been left in Shakespeare's plays 
two hundred years after he had vanished from the 
earth ? Who could have prophesied the vital force 
there would have been remaining in the conversa- 
tions of Jesus after nearly nineteen hundred years 
had come and gone? 

Nothing seems so elusive, when we try to meas- 
ure it, as the imagination ; and yet it is the creative 
element in the mind in every sort of constructive 
work, whether of the mathematician, the inventor, 
the explorer, the poet, the painter, or the prophet 
of religion. 

Herbert Spencer says that, "rightly conceived, 
imagination is the power of mental representation, 
and is measured by the vividness and truth of this 
representation." So understood, he says, it be- 
longs not only to poets, but not less to men of 
science; and he goes so far as to assert that the 
mathematician who discloses to us some previously 



CONQUEST OF THE IMAGINATION 



173 



unknown order of space relations does so by a far 
greater effort of imagination than is implied by 
any poetic creation, and that the constructive im- 
agination is the highest of human faculties. 

Imagination has its basis in the capacity of the 
mind to produce mental images. Some persons 
are able to call up an exact picture of a friend, 
clear and vivid; and others can hear music over 
again, as distinctly as at the first. In most per- 
sons this capacity exists — strong in those of great 
imaginative powers; while in some it appears to 
have only the feeblest existence. The constructive 
or creative imagination is that which can reshape 
these mental images at will, bring out of them 
what had before no existence, and give to airy 
nothings a local habitation and a name. In Mid- 
summer Xight's Dream Shakespeare makes The- 
seus say : 

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet 
Are of imagination all compact. 
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold — 
That is the madman; the lover, all as frantic, 
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt; 
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to 
heaven; 

And as imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 



174 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 



Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 

A local habitation and a name. 

Such tricks hath strong imagination, 

That, if it would hut apprehend some joy, 

It comprehends some bringer of that joy; 

Or in the night, imagining some fear, 

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!" 

Huch that we usually assign to reason un- 
doubtedly lias its origin with the imagination, for 
to the imagination must be assigned the larger 
part of all constructive and original thought. The 
imagination is often strong enough to overcome 
all surrounding circumstances and cause a man 
to live as though they were not. Emerson was 
walking down Bromfield Street in Boston in the 
time of the Millerite excitement, when a friend 
met him and said, "Mr. Emerson, you know the 
world is to come to an end to-day." The philoso- 
pher looked up, with far-away eyes, which indi- 
cated that he was greatly absorbed in some 
thoughts of his own, and placidly remarked, 
"Very well, we can get along without it." 

The imagination also has a power to give to the 
poor man all the sensations of wealth, and on the 
other hand to give to the rich man all the mental 
woes of poverty. A distinguished French writer 
relates that Balzac, the great French novelist, had 
a craving for living grandly while he was yet very 



CONQUEST OF THE IMAGINATION 175 



poor. This writer relates that lie on one occasion 
visited the French publisher Charpentier. He 
was ushered into the publisher's room, and found 
him in conversation with a stout man whom he did 
not know. 

"Yes, my dear Charpentier," said the stout 
man, "it is going to be a complete surprise to my 
mother; she doesn't know a thing about it. You 
see, the chateau and grounds are laid out in this 
way." And then the man went on and drew im- 
aginary lines on the floor with his cane, and in 
brilliant language described in the most pic- 
turesque and fascinating way the different rooms 
of the great chateau, the various outbuildings, the 
parks, and the gardens, and all the luxurious ac- 
cessories of a rich man's estate. The poor man of 
letters who sat listening gaped in wide-mouthed 
wonder and admiration at the description. 

By and by the talker went away with a grand 
air, and the other visitor ventured to ask, "Who 
was that gentleman V 9 

"That was Balzac," said the publisher. 

"Balzac ! why, he must be making a great deal 
of money out of his novels." 

The publisher smiled. 

"What do you suppose he came to see me about 
this morning ? It was to get me to advance him 



176 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

five hundred francs on his next volume — which 
isn't written yet — to pay his board bill !" 

Then the wondering young man understood that 
he had witnessed the building of an air castle. 

The imagination has power to change the very 
atmosphere a man breathes so far as his con- 
sciousness is able to register it. A well-known 
gentleman was once staying overnight in a strange 
room. He had paid little attention to the circum- 
stances of the room on retiring. He awoke in the 
night and felt himself smothering for lack of air. 
He got up and went to the window, and tried to 
lift the sash, but could not. He tugged away at it 
for some time, and finally, when it would not 
move, being rather quick-tempered, he gave such 
a lunge on it that he broke a pane of glass. Then 
he drew in a deep breath, filling his lungs with the 
fresh air from the outside, and went back to bed 
and, falling asleep, slept till morning. You can 
imagine his astonishment to find when he arose 
that he had broken a pane of glass in a bookcase. 

It is certain that there is no such teacher in the 
great realm of human nature as fiction. Is its 
power not in the fact that men feel intuitively 
that the man or woman portrayed imaginatively 
by the true artist in fiction is more near the true, 
real man than any we can find in any other way ? 



CONQUEST OF THE IMAGINATION" 177 

Take those wonderful Scotch stories of Ian 
Maclaren in Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush and 
Auld Lang Syne. A few years ago the whole civ- 
ilized world were laughing and crying over the 
Scotchmen in the Highland glens. Their power 
is that we see them in a halo of warm imagination. 
I suppose that if we were to hunt the glens through 
we should never recognize, with our poor prosaic 
vision, such women as Marget, such doctors as 
William MacLure, or such worldly-wise saints as 
Drumsheugh. And yet, no doubt Maclaren has 
given us the truest portraits of Highlanders yet 
portrayed. Many an old Scot, reading those pic- 
tures, has been fain to cry out, "God knows I 
wanted to be just such a man as that !" 

Just now we are having a great stream of his- 
torical fiction. No other books have so wide a 
reading as these. It must be that the multitude 
feel that here they are getting the truest history. 
I remember many years ago that General O. O. 
Howard said to me, speaking of the history of the 
civil war, that it was his conviction that the truest 
history would be written by some of the great 
writers of fiction who would arise a generation or 
more after the events had passed away. 

I have dwelt so at length on these introductory 
thoughts because I feel that many of us do not 
12 



178 THE GREAT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 

properly estimate the importance of the proper 
education and control of the imagination. The 
fact is that the higher education of youth is likely 
to do enormous harm unless it is dominated by the 
Christian spirit. It is possible to educate a boy 
and give him the most perfect opportunity for the 
development of his mind and have only a polished 
devil after you have him finished off. The great 
value of Christian colleges is largely in this very 
fact. Education sets the imagination free, gives 
it strong wings, gives it the ability of flight; but 
that will be a curse instead of a blessing unless the 
imagination be mastered and directed and con- 
trolled in righteousness. Man's imagination, 
which was intended to be "the candle of the Lord/' 
may be lighted at the devil's fire and become a 
baleful torch that will only illuminate the way to 
disaster and death. 

Sin entered the world through the imagination. 
That was how the serpent gained his first power 
over Eve. He told her that if she ate of the for- 
bidden fruit she would become as wise as a god 
and know everything. What could be more tempt- 
ing to a perfect feminine creation, such as Eve 
was ? Her imagination hung around that state- 
ment, brooded over it until it burst all bounds. 

Men to-day are led into sin by the imagination. 



CONQUEST OF THE IMAGINATION 179 

Some time ago counterfeit silver dollars appeared 
which had more silver in them than the ordinary 
dollar issued by the government, and yet the price 
of silver bullion was so low that it was a great 
fraud on the government. Then a secret service 
officer remembered that two or three years before, 
in a liquor saloon in San Erancisco, he had heard 
some men conversing on the subject of counter- 
feiting, and an old miner standing by had ex- 
pressed the wonder that nobody had ever thought 
of making silver dollars out of pure silver. He 
declared it never could be detected, and when sil- 
ver was cheap it would be a good business. This 
detective officer reasoned that in all probability 
the miner who had conceived that idea was at the 
bottom of the present counterfeiting. He set out 
on the chase, and after several months ran him to 
earth and found he was correct. The man had 
never thought of doing it at first, but he let his 
imagination play on it, until, after a while, being 
hard up for money, it got the better of him, and 
he did it. That is a typical sin. Men think about 
a sin, they imagine and muse about it for a while, 
and then, when the proper opportunity comes, they 
do it. All sin is consciously or unconsciously 
born that way. 

Some strange passages of Scripture become 



180 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

clear as day in the light of our discussion. Take 
the saying of James that a man who hates his 
brother is a murderer, and that other statement of 
J esus Christ, that a class of men who hate another 
circle of their fellow beings are "whited sepul- 
chers, full of dead men's bones," and see how, when 
you bring them together in the light of the im- 
portance of the imagination, they fit into one an- 
other. A great many men commit murder in their 
imagination, and incur its guilt, who never have a 
chance to do it with their hands. They used to 
say of some desperado out on the frontier, "He 
keeps a private graveyard of his own." Of course, 
they had reference to the number of men he had 
killed. But in the light of our theme this morning 
we can see how many outwardly decorous and even 
professedly Christian men and women, who sit in 
church pews, keep "a private graveyard of their 
own" ; and down deep in their secret imaginations 
lie bleaching the bones of the men and women 
whom they have slain. No wonder some people 
have a surly expression and a sort of moldy smell 
to their conversation, when we recognize that they 
are walking graveyards. 

!No teacher appeals so strongly to the imagina- 
tion as Jesus Christ. Christianity owes its mighty 
missionary movements, which are filling the earth 



CONQUEST OF THE IMAGINATION 181 

with the fragrance and glory of his name, to that 
far-reaching imaginative word-picture recorded in 
the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew's Life of Je- 
sus, in which he calls upon every sincere disciple 
to see in the most neglected and broken man or 
woman or child the image and very personality 
of his divine Lord. How beautifully our own 
James Russell Lowell has illustrated this in his 
poetic version of the story of Sir Launf al and the 
search for the Holy Grail. Many of you recall 
the story of the young knight who went away 
proud and self-sufficient in his young manhood in 
search of the Holy Grail, and who, as he went, 
was asked an alms by a poor beggar, to whom he 
flung a gift with scornful contempt. Years after- 
ward he came back, old and frail, and again found 
a beggar at the gate; but this time his treatment 
was very different. Lowell says : 

"But Sir Launfal sees only the grewsome thing, — 
The leper, lank as the rain-blanched bone, 
That cowers beside him, a thing as lone 
And white as the ice-isles of Northern seas 
In the desolate horror of his disease. 

"And Sir Launfal said: 'I behold in thee 
An image of Him who died on the tree; 
Thou also hast had thy crown of thorns — 
Thou also hast had the world's buffets and scorns, 



182 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

And to thy life were not denied 
The wounds in the hands and feet and side: 
Mild Mary's Son, acknowledge me; 
Behold, through him, I give to thee!' 



"As Sir Launfal mused with a downcast face, 
A light shone round about the place; 
The leper no longer crouched at his side, 
But stood before him glorified, 
Shining and tall and fair and straight 
As the pillar that stood by the Beautiful Gate, — 
Himself the Gate whereby men can 
Enter the temple of God in man. 

"His words were shed softer than leaves from the pine, 
And they fell on Sir Launfal as snows on the brine, 
That mingle their softness and quiet in one 
With the shaggy unrest they float down upon; 
And the voice that was softer than silence said: — 
'Lo, it is I, be not afraid! 
In many climes, without avail, 
Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail; 
Behold it is here, — this cup which thou 
Didst fill at the streamlet for me but now; 
This crust is my body broken for thee, 
This water his blood that died on the tree; 
The Holy Supper is kept indeed 
In whatso we share with another's need; 
Not what we give, but what we share — 
For the gift without the giver is bare; 
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, — 
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me.' " 



CHEIST TO A TIEED WOELD 183 



XVII 

Cheist's Peomise to a Tieed Woeld 

Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and 
learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye 
shall find rest unto your souls. — Matthew xi, 28, 29. 

Tissot, the artist, told a very interesting story 
of a vision which came to him in a cathedral in 
Paris, and was the reason for his wonderful career 
as a painter of the Christ and the scenes of his 
life. He was in Paris painting a series of pictures 
representing the pursuits of the society women of 
the city of fashion. At that time it was fashion- 
able among the rich and the gay to sing in the 
choir of some great church, and he wished to make 
a study for his picture, "The Choir Singer." 
With this purpose in mind he went to the Church 
of Saint Sulpice during mass, more to catch its 
atmosphere for his picture than with any idea of 
worship. But he soon found himself joining in 
the devotions, and as the host was elevated and he 
bowed his head and closed his eyes there came be- 
fore the inner eye of his imagination a wonderful 
picture that thrilled him to the very soul. It 



184 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

seemed to him that he was looking at the ruins of 
a castle. The windows were broken, the cornices 
and drains lay shattered on the ground; cannon 
balls and broken bowls added to the debris. And 
then a peasant and his wife picked their way over 
the littered ground; wearily he threw down his 
bundle that contained their all, and the woman 
seated herself on a fallen pillar, burying her face 
in her hands. Her husband, too, sat down, but, in 
pity for her sorrow, strove to sit upright, to play 
the man even in misfortune ; and then there came 
a strange figure of a man gliding toward these 
human ruins over the broken remnants of the 
castle. His feet and hands were pierced and 
bleeding, his head was wreathed with thorns, 
while from his shoulders fell an Oriental cloak 
inscribed with the scenes of the "Fall of Man," 
the "Kiss of Judas." And this figure, needing no 
name, seated himself by the poor peasant, and 
leaned his head upon his shoulder, seeming to say, 
more by the outstretched hands than in worship, 
a See, I have been more miserable than you ; I am 
the solution of all your problems; without me 
civilization is a ruin." This vision pursued 
Tissot after he had left the church. It stood be- 
tween him and his canvas. He tried to brush it 
away; but it persisted in returning. Finally he 



CHRIST TO A TIRED WORLD 185 

painted the vision. He interpreted this vision as 
a call to him to leave the gay butterflies of fashion 
and set himself to paint the Christ who has re- 
deemed the world and has power to give rest to 
the souls of men. 

Our text is Christ's great appeal to the bur- 
dened and the tired, and that makes it an appeal 
to the great mass of men and women. Men every- 
where are groaning under their burdens, and need 
comfort and inspiration and fellowship to make 
the burdens light and the yoke of life easy. Christ 
may have been led to make this exclamation by 
noting the heavy burdens which the poor people 
of his day were compelled to carry on their heads 
or their shoulders. He thus gave expression to 
the great conviction of his soul that he was to make 
the burdens of men lighter. How wonderfully 
that promise has been realized ! Wherever Christ 
has been preached and any people, in any country, 
in any age, have come to recognize Christ in any 
degree, in just so far have the burdens been lifted 
from the shoulders of men. There was not a king 
in the world in the days of Jesus who could have 
as many comforts for bodily health as very poor 
people may have now in our towns and cities. ~No 
longer is the water carried in a leathern bottle on 
the heads of the women; no longer must food be 



186 THE GBEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

cooked over a smoking fire built on the ground in 
the center of wigwam or camp. No longer must 
the clothing be made by hand. Pass on from one 
department of toil to another, and you will find 
that in every field of burdensome labor the quick- 
ened brain of Christian lands is lifting the 
burdens from the shoulders of toiling men and 
women. And this is to go on until the bitterness 
is taken out of the dregs of the cup of labor. In 
Jesus's day nearly all the working people in the 
world were slaves; but age by age the Carpenter 
of Nazareth has been the strongest personality to 
which appeal could be made in the struggle for 
better wages and shorter hours and a nobler life 
in every way for the workers of the world. Jesus 
Christ has given a dignity and a nobility to labor, 
and he will yet lift all cruel and oppressive 
burdens. 

Sin is the great burden maker for the human 
life. Sin it was that enslaved men in the days of 
old, and sin it is that holds them in bondage and 
burdens them now as does nothing else. The 
devil promises pleasure and happiness in sin, but 
he is false, and J ohn Ruskin tells the truth when 
he says, "No man ever enjoyed doing wrong since 
the world began." There is a momentary intoxi- 
cation in sinful pleasures, but there is a bitterness 



CHEIST TO A TIEED WORLD 



187 



and a remorse and a stinging regret which follow, 
which make it impossible for the soul to find rest. 
Robert Burns spoke from experience when he 
said: 

"But pleasures are like poppies spread — 
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed! 
Or like the snow-fall in the river, 
A moment white — then melts forever." 

Lord Byron spoke out of the fullness of bitter 
reality when he wailed : 

"My days are in the yellow leaf, 

The flower and fruits of love are gone; 
The worm, the canker, and the grief 
Are mine alone." 

And these experiences are typical of the results 
of sin always. In the end it lays heavy burdens 
on men's shoulders, heavy loads upon the heart, 
which it will not touch with the tip of a finger. 

Many young men and many young women are 
drawn into sin by the promise of good-fellowship. 
The devil tells them that sinners are more friendly 
and more given to good-fellowship than are Chris- 
tians, and so like the Prodigal they give them- 
selves over to friends who are by no means stead- 
fast when the day of trouble comes. Some of you 
will recall how Thackeray tells us of young Mr. 
Warrington, the Virginian, who, after living in a 



188 THE GBEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

gay and fashionable circle in London, and winning 
and losing large sums of money at the card table, 
at last found himself in jail for debt. He did not 
take it seriously at first, and in a gay fashion he 
sent notes round to his friends, fondly imagining 
that each would be eager to liberate him from his 
imprisonment. But he was greatly surprised to 
receive notes back from all of them, giving the 
very best of reasons and excuses why not one of 
them could give him a penny. And Thackeray 
was true to life. 

There is an old story told in Persia of a Persian 
prince who came among the people in the Great 
Hall clad in an ordinary dress ; and he found that 
everyone, even the servants in the Hall, hustled 
him about, insulted him, and abused him. He 
withdrew rapidly and went and put on his princely 
garments and returned, and then everyone was 
bowing before him, and he said, with a bitter 
truth, "You should not say, 'My lord/ to me, but 
say, 'My lord coat,' for it is the coat you seem to 
respect and not the man." And every prodigal 
has found, like the Prodigal in Christ's story, that 
the friendships and fellowships made in sin, no 
matter how fascinating and intoxicating at the 
time, result only in heavier burdens and more 
cruel heartaches. 



CHEIST TO A TIEED WOELD 



189 



Now, to all such burdened hearts, who have 
sought happiness and satisfaction in sin and 
found only disappointment, Christ comes offering 
a divine rest of soul. No man or woman is so 
burdened but Christ will keep his promise to give 
perfect rest if you will come to him. Do not try 
to ease your burdens by any self-righteousness. 
Bring them all to Christ. Saint Augustine tells 
us that one day in Milan, when his sins burdened 
him until he could stand it no longer, he went out 
alone into the garden behind his house and threw 
himself down in great trouble of soul. He seemed 
then to hear a voice shouting the words, "Take up 
and read! Take up and read!" As he reflected, 
it seemed it must be the oracle of God to his own 
soul, "Take up and read." If that were true, 
there was only one book to read, of course, and so 
he went into his room and opened the New Testa- 
ment and read the words, "Not in rioting and 
drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, 
not in strife and envying. But put ye on the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the 
flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof." And in Christ 
he found rest so sweet and beautiful that he after- 
ward exclaimed: "Too late, too late, have I loved 
thee, O thou ancient and most fresh Loveliness." 
So it will seem to you if you will open God's 



190 THE GEE AT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



Word and read, or if yon will hearken to it as I 
speak it to you. There will come to you such a 
peace, such a rest of forgiveness and confidence 
of soul, that you will marvel that such loveliness 
could be in the world and you utterly oblivious to 
it for so long. 

"Ah, but," some one says, "there is a yoke and 
a burden in Christianity." Yes, indeed ! To be- 
come a Christian does not mean to escape loyalty 
and service. But what kind of a yoke is it % It 
is not a yoke that chafes the shoulder, it is not a 
yoke that indicates ignoble servitude. It is a yoke 
that binds us to the noblest and holiest endeavor, 
it is a yoke which promises for us the most honor- 
able and glorious career that can possibly come to 
us. I was reading not long ago of the supreme 
happiness that had come to a young lady who was 
a student of art and had shown great talent in the 
pursuit of her studies as a sculptor. This young 
woman had finally been received as a student by 
the famous Saint Gaudens. "Now, she was only a 
student, a disciple, of the great sculptor. To be 
that meant hard work, self-denying toil, and exer- 
tion. It meant the putting herself into a yoke 
more severe, so far as earnest work was concerned, 
than any commonplace teacher would exact. But 
the opportunity was received with hearty congrat- 



CHRIST TO A TIRED WORLD 



191 



ulations on the part of her friends, and it was 
regarded as a high honor and a noble privilege. 
The honor and the privilege made all the burden 
of exertion seem light and made the yoke easy. 
So in the higher realm of the soul Christ is the 
great soul-sculptor in the universe. Here is the 
one perfect Teacher, the one absolutely perfect 
Expert in what it takes to make manhood and 
womanhood. To be under him, to be instructed 
by him, to have his gracious teaching, his inspira- 
tion, his encouragement, means to us the possi- 
bility of creating the noblest and most beautiful 
character that is attainable. If it is a great thing 
for a young sculptor to be a disciple of Saint 
Gaudens, how much more wonderful a thing it is 
for a poor sinner who desires to become noble and 
holy and good to have a chance to bear the burden 
and wear the yoke of a loving discipleship to Je- 
sus Christ. Yet that is your divine privilege. Do 
not delay about accepting it. Press into the king- 
dom this very hour ! 



192 THE GrEEAT PBOMISES OF THE BIBLE 



XVIII 

Pbomised Secubitt fob Spibitual Teeastjbes 

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where 
moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break 
through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures 
in "heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, 
and where thieves do not break through nor steal. — 
Matthew vi, 19, 20. 

The desire to lay up treasures is part and par- 
cel of our human nature and of the best side 
of our human nature. It is the savage who does 
not treasure anything. He does not lay up food ; 
he eats until he is in pain when he has taken 
plenty of game in the chase, or the fish have rushed 
into his net, or the season has been rich in nuts or 
fruits that grow on the wild trees or shrubs. But 
he has no cold storage, no barn, no treasure-house 
against the day of need. He lives from hand to 
mouth, and often both the hand and the mouth 
are empty. The growth of civilization develops in 
man this desire to treasure up something for the 
future. It also encourages the laying up of treas- 
ures that are not needed simply to eat or to wear, 
but treasures that are meant to adorn or to beau- 



SECURITY FOR SPIRITUAL TREASURES 193 



tify, and which become treasures through the 
growth of imagination and the development of 
love and fellowship in an intelligent, civilized 
society. 

JsTow there is nothing in the teaching of Jesus 
Christ that would put a stop to or frown upon the 
laying up of treasures to meet the rational needs 
of human life. But there is very earnest teaching 
by our Saviour to the point that all earthly treas- 
ures, which have to do with our eating, and drink- 
ing, and wearing, and the adornment or comfort 
of the body, must be regarded not as of first but 
of secondary importance. Jesus's message is, 
"Seek first the kingdom of God." He supple- 
ments this statement by saying that our heavenly 
Eather recognizes our need of these earthly treas- 
ures, but that we must never for a moment forget 
that the thing we are to seek first is the kingdom 
of God. We are not to suppose that treasures 
which can be put away in a safe deposit vault, 
whether they be deeds, or certificates of stock, or 
gold, or jewels, are of first importance as treasures. 
They are only secondary treasures upon which we 
have a very temporary title, a temporary lease at 
the will of God. It may end in twenty years from 
now, it may end within an hour. We have no 
control over it. Earthly treasures are temporary 
13 



194 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

for many other reasons; they may depreciate in 
value, or they may be stolen. So the Saviour as- 
sures us that nothing could be more foolish than 
for a man to regard as his chief treasures these 
earthly things, when it is possible for him to be 
rich in spiritual treasures that cannot be cor- 
rupted, that no moth can touch, no thief can steal, 
and to which he may have a title as enduring as 
the soul itself. 

my friends, let me urge upon you the em- 
phasis which Jesus Christ puts on seeking spiritual 
treasures first! Give them your first flush of 
youth and enthusiasm; give them your first zest 
of life; pour the full tide of your youthful cour- 
age and vigor down the one flume that turns the 
wheel of your spiritual nature. It will color and 
mold and fashion your entire career in a large 
and generous and heavenly way. Nothing is more 
pitiable than to see men and women in the 
churches who have given all their first enthusiasm, 
their first courage, their first vigor, their first toil 
to the service of mammon, and left spiritual mat- 
ters a very poor second. They have no time to 
pray in their families, because business must be 
first. They have no strength left to teach in the 
Sunday school, because business or pleasure must 
be first. They have no time for the prayer meet- 



SECUEITY FOE SPIEITUAL TEEASUEES 195 

ing, because business or social matters must be 
first. The result is easily foreseen. When such 
people come to be old they are narrowed and 
cramped and prejudiced in their minds and hearts 
until they are only poor, dwarfed, and wizened 
specimens of Christians. Instead of coming to 
old age with large, generous, spiritual natures, all 
sails set and every flag flying, and a rich cargo of 
holy memories to make home-coming glorious, 
they come in lonely and broken, creeping into port, 
like some steamer that has used up its coal on 
the way and had to burn its masts and its cabins 
to push its poor old hulk into the harbor. Who 
wants to live and die like that! My friends, the 
only way to escape it is to obey your divine Lord 
and seek first the kingdom of God and his right- 
eousness, and leave everything else to come in on 
the secondary list. Spiritual graces first, earthly 
graces second. What does that mean ? It means 
that you cannot live without a sweet spirit and a 
kind heart and a patient soul and a gentle, for- 
giving disposition ; but you can get along without 
the new hat or the new house, if necessary. It is 
good to have both; but the spiritual graces must 
be first. 

Now and then we see a man or a woman who 
really takes J esus at his word, to whom the Spirit 



196 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

is always first and the world second; where the 
soul must have what it needs and the flesh can go 
without, if it has to. The deeds of such people 
seem like miracles to us ; hut it is only the common 
miracle of Christianity. It is only living over 
again the life of J esus. God help us to do it ! 

In the last few months a great many rich people 
have become poor; their fortunes have taken to 
themselves wings and have flown away. They 
have found out what men have been finding out 
in every age, that all earthly treasures are transi- 
tory. Amid this world of change and uncertainty 
and loss, I want to speak to you of two or three 
treasures, possible to each of us, which are beyond 
the reach of moth or rust or thief. And I shall 
not speak of any one treasure that is out of reach 
of any man or woman or child here. 

One of these priceless treasures which we may 
carry with us forever, and rejoice in in a million 
years from now as well as to-day, is a knowledge 
of God's Word and a love for it which comes from 
the daily study of it, reverently regarding it as a 
revelation from our heavenly Father. Mr. Hamil- 
ton Wright Mabie, in an essay entitled "A Child 
of Nature," pays this beautiful tribute to the 
Bible. He is telling the story of a country boy, 
and says of him : 



SECURITY FOR SPIRITUAL TREASURES 197 



"So far no book had ever spoken to John Foster. 
He had seen few volumes, and from one Book he 
had heard many things, but no phrase had ever 
crossed the threshold of his mind. In the little 
bare meetinghouse at the point where the roads 
crossed, and from which the whole world seemed 
to spread out, he heard much discussion of this 
Book, and frequent appeals to it ; it seemed to be 
a Pandora's box, in which there were weapons for 
use against one's adversaries, remedies for one's 
illnesses, scourges for one's sins, rewards for one's 
virtues, and a plan of things which was taken 
apart and put together again, like a vast and un- 
interesting puzzle. Sometimes out of all this 
confusion of sound a word, a sentence, a picture, 
an incident suddenly came to life, and glowed for 
a moment, and caught the boy with a thrill so in- 
tense that it was pain; and then the fog of an 
unknown language drifted in, and the glimpse of 
something human and beautiful vanished. The 
atmosphere was lifeless, cold, and gray ; some vast 
system of magic, remote, lying far apart from 
anything he knew or felt. . . . 

"One Sunday, while he was still a child, and 
this mystery perplexed and distressed him, a 
strange hand opened the Book, and a strange voice 
read from it. The voice had in it the magic of 



198 THE GREAT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 



feeling and of insight, and as it retold one of those 
old, familiar stories which hold the mystery of life 
and are deeper than any sounding of plummet, 
suddenly the Book came to life, and the walls 
seemed to dissolve, and with a great rush of fra- 
grance, caught up from fields and woods, Nature 
swept into the room. If there had been the stir 
of angels' wings in the place it could not have 
been holier than it became from that hour ; for the 
harmony once heard was never lost again. 

"When the boy went home he carried the Book 
into the woods, and there it sang to him strange, 
deep harmonies of the stars, with great shoutings 
of the seas and music of birds, and all the sweet, 
familiar melody of the fields ; and in this shining 
world of stars and seas and birds and waving 
grain, which he knew so well, he saw strange 
sights of men moving as in great dreams or caught 
up in great storms and swept like leaves hither and 
thither ; and his heart was heavy with the burden 
of the mystery of life and sore with its sorrows; 
and the veil was lifted from his eyes, and he saw 
men as well as Nature; not with clear sight, but 
in part with his eyes and in part with his 
imagination." 

And I have seen many such a case where right 
on from such a youth the boy or girl has gone, 



SECURITY FOR SPIRITUAL TREASURES 199 

living in the atmosphere of. the Book of books, 
finding in it the strength to do and dare in life's 
great struggles, finding in it sympathy and com- 
fort in hours of bitter tears and anguish, coming 
into it as a ship seeks the harbor when chased by 
the storm. There are places in it which have been 
like a garden of flowers, sanctified by seasons of 
great joy and triumph ; there are other shrines in 
the Holy Word that are sacred because they have 
been visited when the coffin was in the house and 
the hearse was at the door ; scriptures that are like 
that slope of Blount Horeb where Moses put off 
his shoes because the earth on which he stood was 
holy ground. And the owner of that Bible never 
comes back to these places without feeling the 
sacred hush in the air and beholding again the 
bush aflame with fire and listening to the voice of 
God who spake of old. Are you making this 
treasure your own 1 If so, death can never rob 
you of it, for immortality will only make it richer 
and more splendid. 

Another treasure that can never be stolen is the 
memory of a good deed, wrought out with a pure 
motive and a loving purpose to serve God and to 
be unselfishly kind toward your fellow men. This 
is a treasure that no one can take away from you. 
When we look back over life the multitude of 



200 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

things that appeared treasures at the time are 
forgotten. A man never likes to think about the 
time when he got the long end of the bargain, and 
at the discomfort or sorrow or ruin of another 
made a lot of money. He never likes to think 
over that afterward. He may have chuckled over 
it at the time, with a cruel sort of glee, but long 
afterward, when he is sick or old, he would give 
much to forget it. It is a thorn in his pillow 
then. It has ceased to be a treasure. What are 
the things men think of as treasures the memory 
of which is fragrant in the nostrils of old age? 
Inquire of Jacob when he is down in Egypt and 
ready to die, and he will tell you that the two 
things he remembers that he counts worth while 
are, first, the time when God Almighty appeared 
to him and he repented of his sin and was for- 
given. Think of it, the treasure that he remem- 
bers as supreme is full of repentance and self- 
surrender! But it glows with the divine pardon 
which has wrought glorious results in the years 
that have followed. And Jacob will tell you that 
the second great treasure of his life was the love 
that came to him when he found Rachel and 
served seven years for her. 

Repentance, love, service — these are the things 
we remember. A good deed, a kind action, to be 



SECURITY FOR SPIRITUAL TREASURES 201 

patient when you are tempted to anger, to be for- 
bearing when the stress is otherwise, to walk with 
patient footstep and forgiving heart and loving 
service when we are unjustly dealt with, trying to 
find what Jesus would do and what spirit he 
would show if he were placed as we are. If we 
can live in that spirit and with such motives we 
shall gather as we go along the path of life treas- 
ures that never can be stolen. 

There is another treasure which cannot be 
stolen, of which I wish to speak, and that is sin- 
cere and pure love and friendship. Here is a 
realm of treasure where no moth can corrupt and 
where no thief can break through and steal. Our 
earthly association with our loved ones is always 
uncertain and temporary. A good woman took 
her little boys to the barber shop the other day to 
have their hair clipped, and she overheard an 
elderly man, sitting in one of the barber chairs, 
say to the man who was serving him, with heart- 
breaking pathos in his voice, "I have had six boys, 
and have lost them every one." 0, the tender 
chords that vibrate in many of our hearts as we 
recall such losses ! No man ever asks me to go to 
the funeral of a little child but there comes back 
to me, like a flash, the sweet and beautiful face of 
my firstborn son, whose lovely eyes have been 



202 THE GBEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

closed to earth for many years. But, thank God, 
though our earthly association with those whom 
we hold in the bonds of love and friendship may 
be at any time terminated, nothing can really take 
them from us so long as we hold them in mutual 
love with our divine Saviour. We shall see our 
loved ones again. God has received them unto 
himself, but he will not lose them out of his pres- 
ence, and we shall find them again in the land of 
eternal life. They are our treasures forever. 
They sorrow not, for there is no pain in that 
climate; they weep not, for God has wiped away 
all tears from their eyes; they hunger not, for 
they eat and drink at their Lord's table ; they sin 
not, for it is a land of eternal goodness and love. 
We shall see them again; we shall feast ourselves 
upon their love ; they are treasures that no fluctua- 
tions of the stock market can affect. Neither sick- 
ness nor death nor loss of any kind can rob us of 
the blessed fellowship which in our hearts we 
hold with them now and which we shall hold with 
them face to face in the blessed days to come. 

O my friends, how glorious is the fellowship 
with Jesus Christ which makes all these treasures 
real to us ! The Bible, what is it but the frame 
out of which looks the face of Him who was cru- 
cified on the cross as my Saviour? Good deeds, 



SECURITY FOR SPIRITUAL TREASURES 203 

kind actions, service of my fellow men — these 
gather their beauty and their fragrance from fel- 
lowship with Him who went about doing good. 
Eternal fellowship with loving friends gathers all 
its sunshine from that divine love and light which 
falls from the face of Jesus Christ, that which 
makes heaven the land of eternal light and love. 
Let us get close to Christ. Let us bring our hearts 
into perfect touch and pulse-beat with him, and 
then all our treasures that are worth keeping shall 
be beyond the power of the world's frost or winter. 

"My place is where the breath of God 

Gives throbbing life to me; 
But one pulse beats, as on I plod, 

Between my Lord and me. 
His grief is mine, I watch with him; 
His place is mine, I rest in him. 
My joy is vain, unless he cares; 
My love is dross, unless he shares. 
But one pulse beats, as on I plod, 

Between my Lord and me. 

"My place is where the breath of God 

Gives throbbing life to me. 
My work is paltry in his sight, 
My aim is high, and to its height 
He builds the temple of the soul. 
My love is great, and to its whole, 
Not what I weakly manifest, 
He sets the goal, and I am blest. 
But one pulse beats, as on I plod, 

Between my Lord and me. 



204 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

"My place is where the breath of God 

Gives throbbing life to me. 
And there the pastures green do lie, 
And quiet waters are near by, 
Where he himself abides alway, 
To wash the sin-stains of the way. 
He whispers low and sweet to me, 
The thoughts that wake love's fealty, 
Till one pulse beats, as on I plod, 

Between my Lord and me. 

"My place is where the breath of God 

Gives throbbing life to me. 
There every voice is voice divine, 
And wakes new joy in heart of mine, 
The murmuring stream, the storm-swept sea, 
The poet's song, the wild bird's blee, 
The Emmaus walk along the way, 
That brings Christ near and begs him stay, 
Till one pulse beats, as on I plod, 

Between my Lord and me. 

"My place is where the breath of God 

Gives throbbing life to me. 
My path is there, beside his cross, 
Where conflict dwells and life is lost 
And found in him complete again. 
And there, among my fellow men, 
In healing touch I see his hand, 
On wisdom's page I read his plan. 
All things reveal a Christ to me, 
Through throe of pain — in ecstasy. 
But one pulse beats, as on I plod, 

Between my Lord and me." 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



205 



XIX 

The Peomised Home of the Soul 

For we know that, if our earthly house of this taber- 
nacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house 
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. — 2 Corin- 
thians v, 1. 

It is a very graphic and striking illustration 
which the apostle Paul uses in this text to make 
clear the relation between a good man or a good 
woman and the body in which they live. Our 
human body is compared to a tabernacle, or house, 
of a temporary, movable kind, which we are to 
occupy for a while, but which is not to be de- 
pended upon for any lengthy sojourn. Such il- 
lustrations abound in the Bible. Isaiah says, 
"Mine age is departed, and is removed from me 
as a shepherd's tent." It is in harmony with the 
other words which compare men living in this 
world to pilgrims and strangers and travelers on 
the earth, who have here no continuing city. 

Paul's idea of the difference between this 
earthly house of the physical body and the spir- 
itual house into whose possession the good man 
enters on leaving this world reminds me of that 



206 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

frontier life which I knew in my childhood on the 
shores of the Pacific Ocean. A pioneer in those 
days, after six months' travel with an ox team, tired 
out, and usually poverty-stricken, found himself 
in a new and rude world at the beginning of winter. 
There were no sawmills, no lumber, no nails, nor 
other materials for building such a house as he 
had known in the older settled communities from 
whence he had come. There was nothing left for 
him to do but to fell the trees and build him a log 
cabin with its stick and clay chimney and its roof 
of shakes, held down by logs, to protect himself 
and his family from the inclemency of the winter. 
Sometimes he lived for years in this rude, tem- 
porary cabin ; but as time went on, if he were am- 
bitious and industrious and prosperous, he was 
always looking forward to the day when he should 
be able to build him a new house that would be 
permanent. He recognized the fact that the one 
he lived in was very temporary. The squirrels 
would gnaw the chinking out in the summer time, 
and it had to be patched up every autumn to keep 
out the cold blast in the winter. The roof would 
leak, and often a wind would carry parts of it 
away. It was forever having to be mended, and 
was always temporary and uncertain, but if you 
talked with the owner he did not feel badly about 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



207 



it, for lie was looking forward to a new house 
which should be not only permanent in character^ 
but free from all the deficiencies and weaknesses 
of the temporary cabin. This is like Paul's idea 
of the heavenly house. The earthly house is al- 
ways in danger of being dissolved. We are for- 
ever taking medicine to patch up this temporary 
cabin in which we live, and patch it as best we 
may we cannot always keep the roof from leak- 
ing or the fierce blasts of pain from coming in. 
And we know that at their best all our efforts are 
only patchwork, and that one of these days there 
will come a storm when the entire house in which 
we have lived, some of us for a good while, will 
collapse, and we shall have to escape in a hurry. 
Paul understood all that, that the dissolution was 
only a question of time, and it was in the light of 
that fact that his faith shone out so bright and 
clear as he wrote this text, "For we know that, if 
our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, 
we have a building of God, a house not made with 
hands, eternal in the heavens." 

I am sure it will be comforting for us to have 
very clearly impressed on our minds the sharp 
distinction which Saint Paul makes here between 
the soul and the body. This world in which we 
live, so adapted to come in from its material side 



208 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

through all our senses, often deceives us until it 
is easy to live on from day to day without having 
it clearly impressed on us that we are anything 
more than flesh and blood. And there are multi- 
tudes of people who seem to be perfectly satisfied 
so long as they are healthy, have enough to eat 
and drink, and their strong appetites are not in- 
terfered with. So they live on, year after year, 
as though the body was the main thing, and with- 
out taking into account that its importance is only 
that of a house as compared to the man who owns 
it and lives in it. While we live in the body it is 
our duty to take good care of it. We should be 
good housekeepers, keep the body clean and whole- 
some and pure. It is our house, and, if we live 
righteously, the temple of the Holy Ghost, for 
God will dwell with us there. But where we make 
the mistake is when we pay more attention to the 
body than we do to the soul that dwells within. It 
is possible for a man's soul to be sick as well as 
his body. The body has no pains so keen as the 
pangs that the soul knows. There are no dis- 
eases of the body that can make a man so miser- 
able as diseases of the soul. And the man who 
gives attention to the body only and pays no at- 
tention to the health and wholesomeness of his 
soul is preparing pains and sorrows for himself 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 209 

when lie passes out of this temporary house into 
his eternal habitation. It is wise for us to take 
care of the body and keep it in as good a condi- 
tion as we can; but it is of infinitely more im- 
portance that we take care of the tenant inside 
and keep him well and strong and in wholesome 
condition, that no spiritual disease which shall 
unfit him for association with the good and pure 
in the eternal world shall fall upon him. It is a 
matter of small importance that for a few years 
the soul is annoyed by a frail and uncomfortable 
house ; but it is a matter of infinite importance if 
the soul itself becomes degraded and despoiled, so 
that it is unfit for dwelling in fellowship with 
God and his angels. 

The characteristics of the house in which we 
shall live in the heavenly world are not stated in 
detail. Paul says of it that it is "a building of 
God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the 
heavens." I do not for a moment assume to be 
wiser about the conditions of immortality than the 
Word of God. There is one thing sure, however, 
and that is that the teaching of God's Word makes 
it certain that we are not to be simply ghosts in 
the other life. We are not disembodied spirits. 
While we shall not have flesh and blood, subject to 
decay, we shall have a body far more permanent 
14 



210 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

and real than the bodies in which we now dwell. 
Paul makes this very clear in that oft-quoted para- 
graph in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to 
the Corinthians, in which he says, when replying 
to this very question concerning the characteristics 
of the spiritual life in our future career: "But 
some man will say, How are the dead raised up ? 
and with what body do they come ? Thou fool, 
that which thou so west is not quickened, except it 
die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not 
that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may 
chance of wheat, or of some other grain : but God 
giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to 
every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same 
flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, an- 
other flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another 
of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and 
bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is 
one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. 
There is one glory of the sun, and another glory 
of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for 
one star differeth from another star in glory. So 
also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in 
corruption ; it is raised in incorruption : it is sown 
in dishonor; it is raised in glory: it is sown in 
weakness; it is raised in power: it is sown a 
natural body ; it is raised a spiritual body. There 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



211 



is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. 
. . . For this corruptible must put on incor- 
ruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. 
So when this corruptible shall have put on incor- 
ruption, and this mortal shall have put on im- 
mortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying 
that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory." 

This new body, this "building of God," shall 
be free from all the imperfections and weaknesses 
which sin has brought to prey upon our earthly 
bodies. That house is as eternal as this is tem- 
porary. Here we are constantly impressed with 
the uncertainty of our sojourn in the earthly 
house; but there there will be no such thing as 
decay or sickness or pain or sorrow or premonition 
of death. And what shall be true of ourselves will 
be true of our friends and those whom we love. 
The keenest sorrows which any of us ever know in 
this world come to us through the avenue of our 
love and friendship for others. While love is the 
sweetest and noblest gift that God can bestow upon 
us, it is also the cause of our keenest pains and 
sorrows. The sufferings of our friends when we 
are unable to relieve them, the pains and misfor- 
tunes that come to them, and our separations from 
them, bring to us much of the real sorrow known 
in this world. But when we shall dwell in the 



212 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

spiritual body, and shall be at home in the build- 
ing of God in our immortal life, all these causes 
of sorrow will be removed. Our friends will 
dwell in homes as beautiful and as permanent as 
our own; happiness and love will look from eye 
to eye, and all the round of the service of heaven 
will be glad and rejoicing and eternal. 

This immortality, which is the supreme hope of 
mankind, centers in Jesus Christ. Christ has as- 
sured us that he came to bring life and immor- 
tality to light. He clearly stated that he had 
power to take up his life and power to lay it down 
again. He laid down his earthly life upon the 
cross as an atonement for the sins of the world. 
And he declared to his disciples that he did this 
freely and lovingly of his own accord. And be- 
fore he went away from them he gave them the 
most tender and loving assurances concerning 
their own immortality. He said to them: "Let 
not your heart be troubled : ye believe in God, be- 
lieve also in me. In my Father's house are many 
mansions : if it were not so, I would have told you. 
I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and 
prepare a place for you, I will come again, and 
receive you unto myself; that where I am, there 
ye may be also." 

And after this he delivered himself up without 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 213 



a struggle to the soldiers that followed Judas to 
his arrest. He stood before Pilate dumb like a 
lamb before its shearers. He wore the crown of 
thorns in meek submission. He hung upon the 
cross with tender prayers upon his lips for his 
enemies and for his murderers. He spoke pardon 
to the repenting thief who hung on the cross by 
his side and said to him, To-day shalt thou be 
with me in paradise." They took his body and 
laid it in the tomb of Joseph in the garden. They 
rolled a great stone to the mouth of the sepulcher, 
and Pilate to please the chief priests put the seal 
of the Eoman government on the tomb and left a 
detachment of veteran soldiers to keep the dead 
man in his grave ; which they did without trouble 
until the promised morning arrived. Then the 
angel descended from heaven with a face shining 
like lightning, and those stout soldiers, veterans of 
many wars, fell like dead men on every side. The 
angel broke the seal, rolled back the stone from 
the sepulcher, and Christ came forth from the 
grave in mighty power. During the next forty 
days he appeared to Mary, to the disciples on the 
way to Emmaus, to Peter, to the disciples all gath- 
ered together, to a fishing party beside the lake, 
and at one time to more than five hundred people. 
He held communion with these earliest Christians 



214 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

and spoke words which filled them with courage 
and that have been an inspiration in the Christian 
church ever since. And then he led them out to 
Bethany, bade them farewell, and ascended before 
their eyes, while angels came in his stead to com- 
fort their hearts. 

A little while after the ascension of Jesus, 
Stephen, the first Christian martyr, as they were 
stoning the life out of him, fell on his knees, and 
looking upward, with a face that shone like that of 
an angel, declared that he saw Jesus at the right 
hand of God, and commended his soul to his keep- 
ing. What mattered it though the mob had his 
body, the poor earthly house which they had bat- 
tered to pieces; his soul was with Jesus, his 
Saviour and his Lord. 

Dear friends, it is to this blessed immortality 
we are called. Let us live worthy of it, developing 
through all the experiences of our human life such 
a beauty and nobility of spiritual character that 
when the earthly house of our tabernacle shall be 
dissolved, Christ our Lord shall welcome us into 
"a building of God, a house not made with hands, 
eternal in the heavens." 



THE PROMISED RESERVOIR 



215 



XX 

The Promised Keservoir 

how great is thy goodness, which thou hast laid up 
for them that fear thee. — Psalm xxxi, 19. 

This theme came to me one day up in the E"ew 
Hampshire mountains. I had been driving for a 
long time beside a brook. It was not a large 
stream, but very beautiful. Here and there the 
water leaped over great boulders in a dazzling 
white waterfall; now and again it hid in dark, 
deep pools, and then it would spread out and run 
over the shallows, a sheet of water so thin a robin 
could light in it and scarcely wet his knees. 
Sometimes the rocks were stepping-stones, over 
which I saw a chipmunk jump from one to another 
till he reached the farther shore. 

It was a pretty stream, and ever and anon some 
beautiful picture of swirling water awoke the in- 
stincts of the trout fisherman in me, but not once 
had I thought of the stream as of large commercial 
value. It seemed too small to turn great wheels 
or drive huge saws in manufacture. But suddenly 
I turned around the corner of a hill, and there 



216 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

before me lay a long sheet of still water, and I 
exclaimed to my friend, "Ho, our brook has a 
milldam!" And sure enough, at a place where 
naturally there had been a waterfall of twenty 
feet or more, a huge dam had been thrown across 
from one side of the mountain bluff to the other, 
and an enormous reservoir of water had been se- 
cured. Here was a great mill, and though the 
little stream would not have furnished much 
power if used as it came day by day, when stored 
up and laid by to be used at will it furnished all 
the power necessary to cut millions of feet of 
lumber. It was that lumberman's reserve power. 
For dry days and times of drouth he had the back- 
ing of that great milldam. Though it rained not 
for a month, what did it matter, since his reserve 
force was sufficient to carry him over till the 
showers came again. 

The more I thought of the miller and his wis- 
dom in dealing with the brook, the more the ser- 
mon in all of it dawned upon me. I said to my- 
self that life was like that. Much depends on the 
reserve force. ~No man can do his best if he is 
using up, every day, the last vestige of strength 
there is in him. We must have a little reserve to 
draw on. Every business man knows that he can- 
not work well in business affairs if he has to draw 



THE PEOMISED RESERVOIR 217, 

out all his bank account every day. So in neither 
body nor mind nor soul can we be at our best with- 
out some reserve force. 

The whole modern idea of occasional vacations 
from work is built on this philosophy. The idea 
is that by rest from the regular work of our lives 
it is possible to store up physical energy and nerv- 
ous power, so that a man in ten months will do 
more and better work because of the great milldam 
of laid-away strength and force which he has 
gathered than he would in twelve with the unaided 
power of the natural current of his life. 

I understand that this theme will not appeal 
very strongly to those who do not take life serious- 
ly and earnestly. There are many people to whom 
life is always a trout stream and nothing more. 
To eat, to drink, and be merry, to find if possible 
a good time, is all it means to them. Such people 
see no need of a milldam that shall store up power 
to turn the wheel that drives the sharp saw through 
the great logs of difficulty, creating the lumber 
which makes for progress and civilization. But 
men and women who live earnestly know that life 
is serious even when it is most glad. Dr. J. R. 
Miller tells about a traveler who tarried several 
days at Antwerp, and noted with interest the 
effect which the bells in the great cathedral tower 



218 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

had upon him. Every quarter-hour they rang out 
on the air their sweet notes, in soft melody, which 
fell like a delicious rain of music dropping from 
the heavens, as tender and as holy as the songs of 
angels. Then, at the full hour, amid their shower 
of liquid notes of silver, there rang out the solemn 
strokes of the great bell, with iron tongue, deep 
and heavy ; and these heavy tones filled him with 
a feeling of awe. As he listened, hour after hour, 
to the chimes, the tender melody of the smaller, 
sweeter bells reminded him of the mercy and love 
of God, and the solemn undertones that broke on 
his ear at the end of each full hour spoke of the 
awful themes of justice, judgment, and eternity. 

God has organized the world on this theory of 
reserve force. Springtime and summer and 
autumn are intended to fill granaries and cellars 
and barns and storehouses with reserves to be 
drawn upon in the winter. And so happy days 
that are prosperous, days of strength and vigor, 
times of joy and victory, ought to be times when 
we store up faith and courage to meet the darker 
days of trial and difficulty. One of the most beau- 
tiful things, as illustrating this thought, which I 
have ever seen is in a little prayer of Robert Louis 
Stevenson, in which he says: "We thank thee, 
Lord, for the glory of the late days and the ex- 



THE PROMISED RESERVOIR 



219 



cellent face of thy sun. We thank thee for good 
news received. We thank thee for the pleasures 
we have enjoyed, and for those we have been able 
to confer. And now, when the clouds gather, and 
the rain impends over our forest and our home, 
permit us not to be cast down. Let us not lose the 
savor of past mercies and past pleasures ; but, like 
the voice of a bird singing in the rain, let grate- 
ful memories survive in the hour of darkness. 
If there be in front of us any painful duty, 
strengthen us with the grace of courage; if any 
act of mercy, teach us tenderness and patience." 
I am sure that the secret of happiness and true 
comfort lies in the spirit of that prayer. If we 
thus live, we shall always have a storehouse of 
sweet memories that will give us courage and for- 
bearance and patience when we most need them. 

The whole theory of education is built on this 
plan. We educate a boy or a girl not only that 
we may develop and discipline the mind, but that 
each may start out in the world with a certain 
reservoir of intellectual power which may be 
drawn upon for service and with a knowledge of 
the art of gathering other force and storing it up 
against the day of need. The truly educated man 
is the man of resources. He is powerful because 
he has much reserve force. 



220 THE GREAT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 

Daniel Webster once told a good story in a 
speech, and was asked where he got it. He re- 
plied, "I had it laid up in my head for fourteen 
years, and never got a chance to use it until to- 
day." A man said to me not long ago, "When I 
was a little boy my mother used to insist on my 
committing to memory verses of Scripture. Some- 
times I enjoyed it, and sometimes I did not. 
There were times when it was a great bore to me, 
and I could not see any good that could ever come 
from it. But she was inexorable, and the result 
was that I committed to memory, at a time when 
my memory was very tenacious, many of the great 
Scripture promises. Well, last year, I had a 
great trial. For days and weeks unexpected sor- 
rows came upon me until I thought of Job and of 
the troubles that came in upon him like a flood. 
And in that time of sorrow and trouble I thanked 
God over and over again for the wisdom of my 
mother, long since in heaven, who had compelled 
me to store my mind with the rich promises of 
God's Word. When I needed them, there they 
were stored away for that very hour. We all need 
to store up Scripture knowledge to be drawn upon 
in the day of need. It is said of a certain railroad 
engineer who has to go to work at three o'clock in 
the morning that he feels so keenly the need of 



THE PROMISED RESERVOIR 



221 



the study of the Bible that he rises every day at 
two o'clock, in order that he may spend an hour 
in Bible reading and prayerful devotion. Such a 
man goes forth to his day's work with a reserve of 
spiritual force which causes his life to bound forth 
with courage and good cheer. 

Great reserves give great enthusiasm to life. 
The water goes dashing down the millrace when 
there is a huge milldam behind it because all the 
reserve force back of it is pushing it onward, and 
he who lives in communion with God day by day 
may go to his work in that spirit. 

Franz Joseph Haydn was a most cheerful 
Christian. When an old man he said with em- 
phasis, "When I think of my God, my heart 
dances within me for joy, and then my music has 
to dance too." 

Emperor Franz once asked him which of his 
two oratorios he preferred. 

"The Creation!" 

"Why?" 

"Because in the Creation angels speak, and their 
talk is of God." 

In composing, when he felt the ardor of his 
imagination decline, he rose from his work and 
resorted to prayer — an expedient which, he used 
to say, never failed to revive him. "I was," he 



222 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

declared, "never so pious as during the time when 
I worked on the Creation. Daily I fell on my 
knees and begged God to vouchsafe to me strength 
for the fortunate outcome of the work." 

Many lives fail of power and usefulness because 
there is laid up behind them no reserve force 
of confidence and faith which alone can give that 
composure of spirit, that contentment of heart, 
which make a life strong and true. Better than 
wealth, better than any business success, is 
the hidden reservoir of confidence in God and 
assurance of harmony with him that vouchsafes 
to us a brave spirit for the work of every day 
before us. 

The story is told of a Scottish nobleman who, 
seeing an old gardener of his establishment with a 
somewhat threadbare coat, made a rather dis- 
crediting remark on its condition. "It is a verra 
gude coat," said the honest old man. "I cannot 
agree with you there," s#id his lordship. "Ay, it 
is a verra gude coat," persisted the old man; "it 
covers a contented spirit, and that is mair than 
mony a man can say of his coat." 

It is out of such a spirit that Henry van Dyke 
has written his little poem about life, voicing the 
wish of his own soul, and I am sure the wish of 
many of us: 



THE PROMISED EESEEVOER 



223 



"Let me but live my life from year to year 
With, forward face and unreluctant soul, 
Not hastening to nor turning from the goal; 

"Not mourning for the things that disappear 
In the dim past, nor holding back in fear 

From what the future veils; but with a whole 

And happy heart, that pays its toll 
To Youth and Age, and travels on with cheer. 

"So let the way wind up the hill or down, 

Though rough or smooth, the journey will be joy; 
Still seeking what I sought when but a boy, 
New friendship, high adventure, and a crown, 
I shall grow old, but never lose life's zest, 
Because the road's last turn will be the best." 

To live life at its strongest and best we must 
have the Christian's reservoir of hope and strength 
which will give lis confidence not only for the 
presence and good will of God during our earthly 
lives, but will assure us of the divine presence and 
support in the hour of death and in the great 
future toward which we hasten. Paul, writing to 
the Colossians, thanks God most of all for "the 
hope which is laid up for you in heaven, whereof 
ye heard before in the word of the truth of the 
gospel." Writing about his own outlook on the 
future, he says to Timothy, "Henceforth there is 
laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the 
Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that 



224 THE GKEAT PBOMISES OP THE BIBLE 

day: and not to me only, but unto all them also 
that love his appearing." No man can live the 
strong, splendid life which is possible for him 
without the great reserve force of a faith in im- 
mortality and the confident hope of its enjoyment. 

The eloquent Senator Hoar of Massachusetts 
not long ago delivered a eulogy on Robert Burns 
before an audience of Scotchmen, in which he 
said that the whole secret of Scottish history and of 
New England history, also, was to be found in 
that portion of the Cotter's Saturday Night where 
Burns pictures the family worshiping its Maker, 
and he added: "No race or nation will ever be 
great, or will long maintain greatness, unless it 
holds fast to the faith in a living God, in a benefi- 
cent providence, and in a personal immortality. 
To man, as to nation, every gift of noblest origin 
is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath." 

My brother, take care lest the old thought about 
heaven and immortality and the sweet faith in 
God and in his providence in which you were 
reared shall be lost out of your heart and life, and 
your life lose its greatest force and power for lack 
of that immeasurable reservoir of strength. Some- 
times up in the mountains the little crawfish dig 
through the solid embankment, perforating it in 
every direction with little passageways that seem 



THE PROMISED RESERVOIR 225 

insignificant, but which after a time weaken the 
whole dam until it gives way, and the treasures 
of water that were stored up to drive the wheels 
of the mill run to waste and are lost. Is it not 
true that in this great city the devil's crawfish un- 
dermine many a man's hope of heaven ? Is it not 
possible that I speak now to some soul conscious 
of the gnawing claws which are eating out the very 
heart of the most sacred hopes and faiths, so that 
the force which once held you to goodness is being 
wasted \ If so, I call you now to be on your guard 
and to awake ere it is too late to see your danger. 
For such a loss is beyond measure in its terrible 
result. 

On the other hand, if like David we live with 
our hearts full of the consciousness of the goodness 
of God which is laid up for them that trust him, 
we shall face the future with courage, knowing 
that all will be well at the last. We have much 
work we want to do ; there is much we would like 
to change before we die ; but if our hope and faith 
take in the great promise of God, that all things 
work together for good to them that love him, we 
shall do our day's work at full strength and leave 
the result to him without worry. 

A young Scotch girl who had been living for 
some years in this country fell ill, and, knowing 
15 



226 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

that her sickness was unto death, begged to be taken 
back to her native land. On the homeward voy- 
age she kept repeating over and over the sentence, 
"O for a glimpse o' the hills o' Scotland !" Before 
the voyage was half over it was evident to those 
who were caring for her that she could not live to 
see her native land. One evening, just at sunset, 
they brought her on deck. The west was all aglow 
with glory, and for a few minutes she seemed to 
enjoy the scene. Some one said to her, "Is it not 
beautiful ?" She answered, "Yes, but I'd rather 
see the hills o ? Scotland." For a little while she 
closed her eyes, and then, opening them again, and 
with a look of unspeakable gladness on her face, 
she exclaimed, "I see them noo, and aye they're 
bonnie." Then, with a surprised look, she added, 
"I never kenned before that it was the hills o' 
Scotland where the prophet saw the horsemen and 
the chariots, but I see them all, and we are almost 
there." Then, closing her eyes, she was soon at 
home. The friends who stood about her knew 
that it was not the hills of Scotland, but the hills 
of glory that she saw. So we all have our moun- 
tains of ambition; we have the hills of achieve- 
ment toward which we look with longing eyes; 
but we shall not worry if the hilltops of the country 
of the King intervene ere we reach them. 



THE PROMISED RESERVOIR 



227 



It is a terrible thing to come to the end of life 
bankrupt, with the stream of life dried up, with 
all its water wasted ; but it a glorious thing to come 
toward the end with the reservoir full, with every 
wheel turning and every saw cutting its meed of 
service for God and humanity. My friends, there 
is no good thing in forgiveness, in redemption, in 
comfort, in everlasting hope, that God has laid up 
for any soul which may not be yours if you will 
consecrate to him your heart and your service. 



228 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



XXI 

The Promise of Satisfaction 

I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness. — 
Psalm xvii, 15. 

This psalm is the cry of a man beset by diffi- 
culties on every side. It is a prayer of David 
ponred forth from a full heart, in which he pleads 
with God for help and for defense against cruel 
enemies who are bent upon taking away his life. 
David had deserved only good of Saul and of the 
nation. His life had been simple; his deeds had 
been heroic ; his heart had been as open and frank 
as the sunshine; and yet Saul's envy and hatred 
and malice had driven him from his wife and 
children, and he was hunted like a wild beast 
through the wilderness. The greatness of the 
man's character comes out in these psalms that 
were written under such circumstances. The hills 
and the forests through which he was passing from 
day to day are drawn upon in the psalms as illus- 
trations to make known his spiritual needs. Speak- 
ing of his purpose to do right under all circum- 
stances, David says, "By the word of thy lips I 



THE PROMISE OF SATISFACTION" 229 

have kept me from the paths of the destroyer. 
Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps 
slip not." There were no roads in the wilderness ; 
the hills were rugged; there were only trails here 
and there, and in many places a man must be care- 
ful not to slip and fall over a precipice. All that 
to David was an illustration of the spiritual dan- 
ger, and he prays God that he may not fall on the 
heavenly trail. Other illustrations abound. As 
he had crowded through the thicket during the 
day a gnat or a speck of dust had fallen into his 
eye, and the delicate, sensitive apple of the eye 
had retained his attention. Later on he had seen 
the mother eagle hovering over her nest on a 
mountain crag. And when at night he came to 
write this psalm he prayed, "Keep me as the apple 
of the eye; hide me under the shadow of thy 
wings." 

A man so beset, feeling all the stings of poverty 
and the loneliness of exile, is tempted constantly 
to envy those who are rich and strong and have 
seemingly nothing to disturb their pleasure. And 
so he recalls some rich men of the world, whom 
he knows, who do not care much for God or his 
church, but whose stout boxes are full of treasure 
and whose paths seem to run smoothly; while, on 
the other hand, David has nothing to comfort him 



230 THE GEE AT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 

except the consolation of knowing that he is doing- 
right and that God is pleased with him. Yet he 
closes his psalm in perfect confidence, content even 
to die in exile if he but awake in the likeness of 
his God, feeling that in that he shall he perfectly 
satisfied. After picturing all the glories of men 
who are depending entirely upon worldly things 
for their happiness, and reflecting how temporary 
and unsatisfactory such happiness must be, he 
turns to his spiritual joy, and says, "As for me, 
I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall 
be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness." 

This figure is peculiarly comforting to us as 
Christians, because practically the same figure is 
used in the New Testament in promise that we 
shall become like the Lord J esus Christ. John, the 
beloved disciple, in his first epistle says : "Beloved, 
now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet 
appear what we shall be : but we know that, when 
he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we 
shall see him as he is. And every man that hath 
this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is 
pure." 

Now I take it that these two scriptures ought 
to teach us the same lesson. David had no hope 
of seeing the face of God except in righteousness. 
Meditating on God's perfections, trusting in his 



THE PROMISE OF SATISFACTION 231 



goodness, seeking day by day to be guided and held 
by the divine hand, he had content, and rested in 
the hope of perfect satisfaction when at last he 
should awake in the likeness of God. According 
to Saint John, every Christian is now the son of 
God and as a son is growing in the knowledge and 
likeness of his heavenly Father. Having this 
divine hope in his heart, he purifies himself from 
wicked things and struggles to live worthy of his 
high destiny until he shall awake at last in the 
spotless likeness of his divine Lord. 

The story is told of a young prince who was 
stolen away in childhood from his fathers palace 
and brought up in the midst of unworthy sur- 
roundings. After many years he was recovered 
and brought back. By degrees he came to under- 
stand his position. He did not quite understand 
it at first, and he was full of gratitude when he 
contrasted what he was with what he Had been. 
Yet he had many difficulties. The habits of years 
of depraved life were not easily shaken off. But 
he contended manfully against the difficulties and 
climbed up slowly and surely to a fitness for the 
position into which he had been so happily rein- 
stated. Two considerations influenced this young 
man. First, he desired to act worthily of his 
princely state ; and then, because he knew he was 



232 THE GrKEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

to inherit his father's scepter and rule over large 
populations, he desired to qualify himself for the 
task and responsibility of ruling. 

This little story illustrates our situation as 
Christians. We are now the sons of God. Many 
of us have been carried away by wicked sins, but 
we have been rescued and brought back and are 
learning our duties as princes in the royal family 
of heaven. It is our privilege, it is our duty, to 
live every day in a way worthy of the children 
of God, and we are to look forward to the day 
when our immortality in honor and glory is to 
begin in fellowship with our divine Lord, and to 
the full realization of the promise that when we 
shall look in his face we shall see that we are like 
him and we shall be satisfied. 

We are now in the midst of the struggle to be- 
come like Jesus. God help us that we do not lose 
sight of the fact that that is the greatest possible 
ambition which our minds and hearts can now 
hold. r A.t the beginning all we can do is to trust, 
to rest upon God by faith. & father who had 
one little child, in whom his very soul was bound 
up, was shocked not long ago to be told by the 
physician that his boy must undergo a serious 
surgical operation. It required all the moral 
strength the man had to lay the little fellow upon 



THE PEOMISE OF SATISFACTION 233 

the operating table with his own hands. Four 
surgeons stood around the boyish form. While 
the father held the little palm they administered 
the anaesthetic, and while every nerve in that 
father's body was quivering with the agony of 
suppressed feeling the brave little lad whispered, 
as he felt unconsciousness stealing over him, "It's 
all right, fader." No wonder the surgeons had 
to dash something from their eyes before they 
could see their knives. Dear friends, we are the 
children of God. In the hour when we cannot 
understand, and when we see but vaguely and 
dimly, we must tighten our hold upon God, and 
say, "It is all right, Father." 

I used to live near the Perkins Institution for 
the Blind, in South Boston, while Helen Keller 
was receiving her first instruction there. Blind, 
deaf, and dumb, she was struggling out to the light 
along the single nerve of sensation. Her only 
possible hope was in the confidence and faith of 
others. One day her teacher told Helen Keller, 
through her fingers, that there was a nerve in the 
ear for hearing, but that something had deadened 
her nerve in infancy. That, though all seemed 
silent to her, yet there were soldiers marching 
through the streets, keeping step to the sound of 
martial music. And Helen trustingly answered, 



234 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

"I understand, and I believe." One day the 
teacher asked Phillips Brooks to tell the little 
blind girl about God, and interpreting through the 
fingers of her teacher, the great preacher told her 
that God was very near to her ; that he loved her, 
and would never let go of her hand, either in life 
or in death. And the trusting child answered, "I 
have often felt him. He comes like warmth. But 
I did not know before what to call him." And so 
Helen Keller entered into the great joy of faith 
in God and struggling to be like him. 

David sought to become like God by meditating 
upon him and holding himself to righteousness in 
the divine strength. John sets before us the same 
great ideal. He points our faces toward Jesus, 
and declares that the climax of human life shall 
come when we shall see him as he is. We get a 
glimpse of him at conversion, and we see him with 
more or less clearness all the way along as we 
trust him and love him and try to serve him. I 
was once trying to lead a young blind man to 
Christ. He was a very intelligent young fellow; 
had been brought up in a Christian home, and 
was very willing to become a Christian. But he 
told me that his mind was confused and he did not 
know just how to take hold upon Christ. He did 
not discern the way. I said, "Let us kneel down 



THE PEOMISE OF SATISFACTION 235 

and pray, and ask Jesus about it. I am sure that 
he will show us the way if we ask him in faith." 
So we knelt down, side by side, and after I had 
prayed I asked him to pray, and in a few boyish 
sentences, with the simplicity of childhood, he 
prayed; but the prayer was broken into by his 
suddenly exclaiming, "I see! I see! It is all 
clear now!" The blind man had seen "the King 
in his beauty." Yet all revelation of Jesus here 
is as nothing to the glory of that vision which shall 
be ours when we shall awake at last in his likeness. 

I have a great desire this morning that every 
one of us shall catch inspiration from our study of 
this blessed promise to quicken us in our ambitions 
to grow into the likeness of Christ. 

Dr. Joseph Parker, who has so recently entered 
into that world of perfect vision, comments with 
characteristic vigor on the old philosophical theory 
that a man is turned into what he looks upon lov- 
ingly — that is to say, there were philosophers who 
would contend strenuously that if we looked at 
beauty we should become beautiful ; if we looked 
at hideousness we should become debased by the 
sight. The great London preacher avowed that 
there is an element of truth in that theory; and 
that element of truth finds its culmination, its 
glorification, in this very doctrine of seeing God 



236 THE GEE AT PROMISES OP THE BIBLE 

and being transformed by the sight into the same 
image. But we must not forget that there must 
be responsiveness, sympathy; there must be real 
love of the object that is gazed upon, or no such 
transformation will ever begin. You may so handle 
a flower as to do it merely for the sake of getting 
wages; then the flowers work no change in your 
face ; they do not help your wrinkles into furrows 
for the reception of the seed of heaven. You 
must love your art, and you will be affected by 
it. Love your flowers, and you will become beau- 
tiful, if not in form, yet in spirit and aspiration 
and longing for the heavenly. So if we love our 
Bibles, if we gaze upon the face of Jesus Christ 
with reverent and tender desire, we shall become 
beautiful in spirit, in thought, in chastened feel- 
ing, and even the most destructive storms of trial 
that sweep across our lives will contribute to the 
growth of spiritual beauty in us if we are devoted 
to this great ambition of becoming like Jesus. 

There has been a strange revelation in the erup- 
tion of Mont Pelee. It has been found that in 
volcanic ashes there is an unheard-of fertilizer. 
It is said that in Saint Vincent, wherever the 
dust has fallen, the flowers are beginning to bloom 
with a luxuriance and a glory never dreamed of 
before. So it is often true in our lives that the 



THE PROMISE OF SATISFACTION 237 

likeness of Jesus in us develops with greatest 
rapidity when the volcanic ashes of some great- 
sorrow or disappointment have fallen over us. 
This reminds me of that great host which John 
saw in his vision of heaven, a host that were so 
glorious beyond all others that he inquired of his 
heavenly visitant who they were, and the response 
was, "These are they which came out of great 
tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made 
them white in the blood of the Lamb." Surely it 
were wise to welcome sorrow, to be patient under 
grief, to bear disappointments with fortitude, if 
these may be God's angels to develop in us the like- 
ness to Jesus Christ which shall at last fill us 
with perfect satisfaction. 

Our text has a very beautiful suggestion of the 
naturalness of death. It is simply a going to 
sleep, and to the good man with assurance of an 
awakening in a realm of perfect satisfaction, 
where he shall find himself in sweetest harmony 
with that land, seeing that he himself is in the 
perfect likeness of the King. Sir Edwin Arnold, 
in his Light of Asia, translates a little Persian 
story into a poem which helpfully suggests how 
little death means to the triumph of the soul. Ab- 
dallah is represented as speaking about his own 
body after he is dead, and he says: 



238 THE GREAT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 

"Faithful friends, it lies, I know, 
Pale and white, and cold as snow; 
And ye say, 'Abdallah's dead,' 
Weeping at the feet and head. 
I can see your falling tears, 
I can hear your sighs and prayers; 
Yet I smile and whisper this: 
'I am not the thing you kiss! 
Cease your tears and let it lie; 
It was mine — it is not I.' 

"Sweet friends, what the women lave 
For the last sleep of the grave 
Is the hut that I am quitting, 
Is the garment no more fitting, 
Is the cage from which at last, 
Like a bird, my soul has passed. 
Love the inmate, not the room; 
The wearer, not the garb — the plume 
Of the eagle, not the bars 
That keep him from the splendid stars. 

"Loving friends, O rise and dry 

Straightway every weeping eye; 

What ye lift upon the bier 
. Is not worth one single tear. 

'Tis an empty seashell — one 

Out of which the pearl is gone. 

The shell is broken, it lies there; 

The pearl, the all, the soul is here." 

God grant that in the day when we arise we may 
not be homeless nor exiled, but may say with 
David, "I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with 
thy likeness." 



GRACE TO BEAR THE THORN 239 



XXII 

The Promise of Grace to Bear the Thorn 

And lest I should be exalted above measure through 
the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me 
a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet 
me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this 
thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart 
from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient 
for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. 
— 2 Corinthians xii, 7-9. 

What was this thorn in the flesh which cut Paul 
to the quick and kept him humble ? I do not know. 
Por reasons satisfactory to himself Paul did not 
tell us. Perhaps it was some little thing that 
men would only have laughed at if he had told 
them, and yet something which, like the sting of 
a mosquito, was so poisonous and annoying that no 
words could express properly its provoking proper- 
ties. Paul had had great honor and blessing from 
God. He had been taken up into the "third 
heaven" in his Christian experience. He had be- 
held things unutterable. He was lifted up, ex- 
alted, glorified. And his great danger and tempta- 
tion, as a result, was spiritual pride. Then, lest 



240 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

he be exalted overmuch, God sent him the thorn 
in the flesh to remind him of his frailty, of his 
weakness, of his utter and helpless dependence 
upon God. And it is the glory of Paul's career 
that in that humiliating experience he turned to 
God to seek relief. 

'Now, Paul was not alone in this experience of 
the thorn in the flesh. It would seem that God 
balances our gifts, and if he bestows a great bless- 
ing upon us in any way he seeks by some thorn 
in the flesh to save us from vanity and pride and 
hold us to faithful devotion to the work for which 
we were created. It does not always succeed, for 
even God will not override the human will. Some- 
times a man refuses to see God's mercy in the 
thorn in the flesh, but hardens his heart, and grits 
his teeth, and shakes his fist in the face of his 
Creator. Then the thorn in the flesh only adds 
to his misery. If you want to see a contrast such 
as that, take those two brilliant Englishmen, Lord 
Byron and John Wesley. Lord Byron was one of 
the most brilliant of the Englishmen of his day. 
Eew men in the history of the world have had a 
rarer or nobler poetic gift than was given to Byron. 
But Byron had a clubfoot, and that clubfoot was 
his thorn in the flesh. If he had been reverent 
and pure and devout, he would have been one of 



GRACE TO BEAR THE THORN 241 

the world's greatest geniuses through all time, and 
his infirmity would have but sweetened his nature 
and would have added a note of tenderness and 
sympathy to the world's anthem of praise. But 
turning from God, poisoned and bitter against 
God on account of his weakness, it brought him 
misery and disaster. 

Turn from the brilliant poet to the no less bril- 
liant evangelist and reformer, John Wesley. Wes- 
ley's thorn in the flesh was a jealous, scolding, 
malignant wife, a woman hard to match in the 
history of civilization for cruelty and venom, a 
woman who spit in his face, who pulled his hair 
out by the roots, who lied about him in private 
and libeled him in public, and about whom the poet 
Southey said that she tormented him in such a 
manner by her outrageous jealousy and abominable 
temper that she deserved to be classed in a triad 
with Xanthippe and the wife of Job as one of the 
three bad wives. John Wesley had her for wife 
for twenty years, and all those twenty years grew 
in grace and in fame and in usefulness, putting 
his shoulders the farther under the world's needs 
and making himself every year a greater blessing 
to humanity. What effect the thorn in the flesh 
shall have depends on how we take it and on our 
relation to God. 
16 



242 THE GREAT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 

The message of our text is of far higher value 
to us from the very fact that the special thorn in 
the flesh from which Paul suffered is not made 
known to us. As another has said, the attempt 
to determine the exact measure of Paul's trial is 
like the attempt to ascertain the species of the lily 
Christ alluded to in the Sermon on the Mount. 
It might be interesting to the botanist to have a 
scientific determination of the plant, but the lesson 
of trust in Providence can be learned equally as 
well from the daisy, or the buttercup, or the violet. 
So in this case. The discipline which came to 
Paul through his thorn in the flesh may come to 
every one in this audience through the suffering 
of some different ill or sorrow, if it is borne in 
the same spirit and with the same reverent attitude 
toward God. Paul was in danger of spiritual 
pride. Religious ecstasy is a gift rather than an 
acquirement, and those whose temperament leads 
to it are likely to be tempted to plume themselves 
on this account on a supposed superiority to their 
fellow Christians. As Paul could soar, while 
others had to remain on the level, he might be 
tempted to underestimate them and to overestimate 
himself. Whenever such feelings arose there was 
the sharp pang of the thorn to recall him to him- 
self and remind him that he shared the infirmities 



GEACE TO BEAK THE THORN 243 

of ordinary mortals. An excessive valuation of 
self is brought down by repeated failures in life 
which remind us how narrow are the limits of 
human power. I am sure there is no one listening 
to -me who has not had some experience on this 
line. You have had some great success. Every- 
thing has seemed to be going your way. You have 
said to yourself as others have failed and gone 
down, "My mountain standeth fast." And just 
then, when you were beginning to be swelled up 
and puffed beyond measure in your own opinion, 
there came a sharp twinge of pain from an unex- 
pected point. It may have been your own health ; 
you had been well and strong, did not know you 
had a stomach or a liver or a heart, they did their 
work so easily; but all at once you became pain- 
fully and most humiliatingly conscious of one or 
more of these organs. You began to be anxious 
about your health. When you read in the Bible 
God's message to Hezekiah, "Set thine house in 
order, for thou shalt die and not live," it came 
home to you with a wonderfully new meaning. 
If, under that touch of the thorn, you became 
humble and prayerful and trustful toward God 
and kinder to your neighbors, then the thorn ful- 
filled its mission. But if you stiffened yourself 
against it, and became bitter and cross and less 



244 THE GEEAT PKOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

devout, then it is failing and may finally fail of 
its divine mission to your soul. 

The great secret of Paul's triumphant career 
was his reverence toward God. At first he did not 
understand the purpose of this thorn in the flesh. 
It annoyed him beyond measure, and he besought 
God that he might be rid of it. He tells us that 
three times he most earnestly pleaded with God 
to take it away from him, and then God answered 
his prayer not by taking away the thorn in the 
flesh — God saw that that was necessary for Paul 
all the way through ; but he told Paul that while 
it remained with him his grace would be sufficient 
for him. 

Paul lived in such sensitive fellowship with God 
that he was constantly receiving impressions from 
the Holy Spirit. Strange that anyone should 
doubt God's power to thus speak to his children ! 

Only the other day a coach dog became lost 
from his master, and the poor dog hunted every- 
where for him, up and down many streets, in great 
misery. At last he was found by one of his mas- 
ter's friends, who went to his office and asked by 
telephone if the gentleman had lost his dog. 

"Yes; where is he?" was the reply. 

"He is here. Suppose you call him through the 
telephone." 



GEACE TO BEAR THE THORN" 245 

The dog's ear was placed over the ear-piece, and 
his master said: "Jack! Jack! Jack! How are 
you, Jack V 9 Jack instantly recognized the voice, 
and began to yelp. He licked the telephone fondly, 
seeming to think that his master was inside the 
casing. At the other end of the line the gentle- 
man recognized the familiar barks, and shortly 
afterward he reached his friend's office to claim 
his property. 

Strange, is it not, that men who will accept 
without question the fact that a master may call 
his dog across miles of space through the telephone 
have been caught in a maze of doubt at the power 
of Almighty God, the Creator of the universe, to 
speak to the hearts of his children? But Paul 
knew, what every one in the world knows who 
reverently and with childlike faith approaches God 
from day to day, that God does speak to those 
who love him and trust him. If you would learn 
the secret of the sorrows and trials of life, you 
must live in this tender and childlike communion 
with your heavenly Pather. 

Paul was convinced that the thorn in the flesh 
would never be taken away. He would carry it 
with him while he lived. Prom day to day he 
would feel its sharp pricking, and he would carry 
it on until he laid it down at last before a the great 



246 THE CKREAT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 

white throne" in heaven. And yet he was content, 
and more than content, for God promised him 
grace to bear it; not grace to bear it all at once, 
but grace to bear it a day at a time, as he went 
along. There is a little old story of the discon- 
tented pendulum. The pendulum began to reflect 
how often it had swung in the hour, and then, 
multiplying its strokes by the hours of the day, 
and these again by the days in the weeks, and these 
finally by the weeks in the year, it came to see 
how very often it would have to move backward 
and forward in one year; and, overwhelmed with 
the thought, it suddenly stopped. It began to 
swing again only when reminded that, after all, 
it was never required to move oftener than once 
a second, and that it had nothing to do with the 
future. We all need to learn the lesson of the 
pendulum. If we go forward trustingly, God will 
give us grace to bear our thorn in the flesh, what- 
ever it is, by degrees, as we need it. 

God's promise will hold good for us as we go 
forward doing our duty. It is like breathing. A 
man does not need a whole room full of air for 
one breath. I have been told that an apparatus 
has been recently invented for preserving life in 
mines where there are poisonous gases which up 
to this time have been fatal to human life. Like 



GEACE TO BEAR THE THORN" 247 



all great inventions, it is a very simple contriv- 
ance. The miner carries on his back a knapsack, 
which contains a supply of pure air. From this 
a tube is conveyed to the mouth, while the nostrils 
are closed by a spring. The same vessel is con- 
nected with a bright lamp, fastened to the miner's 
chest. Both the man and his light are perfectly 
independent of the atmosphere about them, which 
is full of the deadly fire-damp. The knapsack be- 
ing connected by a tube with a reservoir of air fed 
from above, existence and light can be maintained 
for a long period amid the most deadly gases. So, 
my brother, it is possible for you, whatever the 
thorn in the flesh which gives you pain, whatever 
the poisonous atmosphere in which you may have 
to toil for your daily bread, to draw the air your 
soul breathes, and the illumination for your path, 
from the upper world, while you go bravely for- 
ward, digging heavenly gold even in the very midst 
of the fire-damp of hell itself. 

We must come to look at our sorrows and our 
trials as Paul looked at his if we would live the 
same victorious life and keep young and fresh and 
brave to the very last, as he did. This very thorn 
in the flesh for which Paul had earnestly besought 
God that it might be taken from him became after 
a while a thing of rejoicing to him. He says about 



248 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

it: "Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in 
my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest 
upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, 
in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in 
distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, 
then am I strong." Dear friends, we must learn 
that art — how to get strength out of weakness. 
Robert Collyer once crossed the Suspension Bridge 
helow Niagara and had an interesting talk with a 
gentleman about the crystallization of iron. They 
agreed that every train which crossed the bridge 
did something to disintegrate the iron particles 
and break the bridge down, and that if this process 
should go on long enough there would be a last 
train which would shoot right down into the gulf. 
But long before this could come to pass all these 
strands and cables would be made over again in 
the fire and under the hammer and come out as 
strong and good as ever. To take them out and let 
them lie at rest on the banks by the river would 
be no sort of use. The ironmaster would say, 
"That would make the strands eternally unfit for 
their purpose ; the hammer and fire can make them 
better and stronger than ever." And this is the 
law of life, that the fineness and strength essential 
to our best being and to make us do our best work 
come by the thorn in the flesh, which may act in 



GEACE TO BEAR THE THORN 249 

us as the fire acts in the iron, welding the fiber 
afresh and creating the whole anew. So we may 
comfort ourselves with the thought that in the 
midst of the trials and burden-bearing of our 
Christian lives, if we live in faith and fellowship 
in Christ, there shall be a divine alchemy con- 
stantly renewing our stregnth, so that in weakness 
we shall be made strong. Neither do we need to 
fear anything that may come to us in the future. 
God will not grow old or feeble that he shall forget 
us, and though we carry our thorn in the flesh 
with us until our journey is done, his grace shall 
be sufficient, and in our weakness we shall find 
strength. 

There is a story of a shipwreck which tells how 
the crew and the passengers had to leave the broken 
vessel and take to the boats. The sea was rough, 
and great care in rowing and steering was neces- 
sary in order to guard the heavily laden boat, not 
from the ordinary waves, which they rowed over 
easily, but from the great cross-seas. Night was 
approaching, and the hearts of all sank as they 
asked what they should do in the darkness when 
they would no longer be able to see these terrible 
waves. To their great joy, however, when it grew 
dark they discovered they were in phosphorescent 
water and that each dangerous wave rolled up 



250 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

crested with light, which made it as clearly visible 
as if it were midday. 

So it shall be with every trusting heart who 
faces the future of life's voyage in the spirit which 
Paul has illustrated to us in this incident which 
we have studied together. You shall meet no great 
sorrow that will not carry in itself the light which 
will take away the peril and the terror. The night 
of trial comes bearing its own lamp of comfort. 
The hour of weakness brings with it its precious 
secret of strength. By the brink of the bitter 
waters of Marah there grows a tree the branches 
of which will forever make them sweet. The wil- 
derness may have its times of hunger and drought, 
but there shall be no morning without its heavenly 
manna. Your Gethsemane may be dark, but the 
angels that comforted your Master and whispered 
messages of love and courage in his ear shall min- 
ister to you and bring you home in peace. 



THE GUARDIANSHIP OF THE SOUL 251 



XXIII 

The Promised Guardianship of the Soul 

And the peace of God, which passeth all understand- 
ing, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ 
Jesus. — Philippians iv, 7. 

When Christ was bidding farewell to his dis- 
ciples the sweetest word he could say to those 
dearest friends was, "My peace I leave with yon." 
And the Saviour supplements that statement with 
the declaration that he does not bestow it as the 
world does. It was not a worldly gift, and it was 
not of the ephemeral and transient sort, which is 
the only kind of gifts the world has power to 
bestow upon ns. 

The promise is exceedingly interesting to us 
because every human soul comes very soon on life's 
journey to feel the need of a guard, of some one to 
keep him from falling and to keep him from anx- 
iety and fear. There could be no other guard so 
splendid as the peace of God, for peace means ban- 
ishment of fear and the absence of anxious care. 

Let us notice the character of this peace which 
alone can keep guard over the soul. It is the peace 



252 THE GREAT PROMISES OP THE BIBLE 

of God. That means that its foundation is in 
absolute honesty and sincerity. There is no deceit 
with God. If we have the peace of God nothing 
can disturb it, because there is no hidden deception 
which, if brought to light, could shame us for a 
moment. The man who sets out to be kept by the 
peace of God has given himself completely to the 
right at whatever cost. Multitudes of people there 
are who banish all possibilities of peace because 
their lives are a network of deceptions and falsities. 

A Christian man riding in a train the other day 
had behind him a mother and a boy, a very prom- 
ising little fellow. The conductor had punched 
the mother's ticket ; and, as a ticket had not been 
provided for the boy, the conductor, looking at the 
boy, politely said, a Is your boy under five, 
madam ?" 

"Yes," was the prompt reply. 

The conductor moved on, and the youngster 
said to his mother, "Why, mamma, I'm past six." 

Instantly, with frowning face, and a counte- 
nance blazing with wrath, the mother said : "Don't 
you ever contradict me again. I know what I'm 
saying. If the conductor had heard you say that 
he would have made me pay half fare for you. 
Don't ever say again on a train that you are past 
six. If you do, I'll whip you when you get home." 



THE GUARDIANSHIP OF THE SOUL 253 

The boy was still and thoughtful for a moment. 
Then the gentleman heard him say, in a remon- 
strative tone, "But, mamma, I am past six." 

A slap followed; the child cried; the mother 
looked like a tempest ; and the man who overheard 
it fairly boiled with indignation. 

Mr. John Willis Baer, who had overheard this 
conversation, summed it up that a railroad acci- 
dent which had crippled this boy physically for 
life would probably not have done him so much 
harm as that incident. But think of the mother. 
She lied to the conductor ; she lied to her own boy ; 
she cheated the railroad; she abused her child. 
The tempest of anger into which she was thrown 
revealed the immediate result of it all in her 
own inner nature. Naturally peace was impos- 
sible to her, for true peace, the peace of God, is 
born of a clean conscience and an open mind to 
do the right. 

There are some glorious characteristics about 
this keeping power of the peace of God. It is able 
to keep the heart joyous in the midst of every un- 
toward circumstance. Many of you know that 
Mr. Ira D. Sankey, whose fame filled all the world 
for many years during his association with Mr. 
Moody in evangelistic work, has become hopelessly 
blind. He has to be led about like a little child. 



254 THE GrEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

If you recall the big, square-shouldered, strong, 
active man Mr. Sankey was, you can imagine some- 
thing of what that must mean to him. But a 
friend who saw him recently says that his old 
cheery spirit is still with him, and Mr. Sankey 
lately said : "Don't let my friends worry about me ; 
all is well with me, and the road is bright." The 
peace of God is on guard at the door of his heart. 
In a situation which would drive many men to 
suicide and which would overwhelm others with 
constant gloom and depression he lives a life of 
reverent gratitude toward God and loving fellow- 
ship with all who meet him. 

There is another characteristic of this guard of 
the soul, and that is that worldly surroundings, 
such as riches or poverty, have absolutely nothing 
to do with it. 

A certain lady who belonged to a noble family 
in Europe suddenly lost her husband by death, 
leaving her in the deepest depression. The world 
lost its charm ; the pleasures of society, which had 
been very delightful to her before, now only dis- 
gusted her. Her life was utterly without zest and 
hope. One day a shoemaker came to call upon her 
in the pursuit of his trade, and she observed that 
he wore a countenance more serene and peaceful 
than any she had ever seen. The glory that beamed 



THE GUARDIANSHIP OF THE SOUL 255 

from this humble cobbler's face threw her own 
unhappy soul into still deeper shadows. She asked 
him if he was happy. His simple answer was, "I 
am the happiest of men." 

After the shoemaker had finished his work and 
gone away the light of his countenance lingered 
with her, and she sent for him to come again and 
tell her the secret of his happy life. In simple, 
honest language he told her the story of how he 
had been led to Christ, how his sins had been for- 
given, his conscience set at rest, and of the love of 
God that filled his heart with perfect contentment 
and peace. This life won her out of all her dark- 
ness and gloom to trust Christ and find the same 
peace of God which had made the poor shoemaker 
so happy. 

I was reading recently the account of a patriotic 
meeting in which the speakers one after another 
had eulogized a number of great popular heroes. 
At last a man rose to speak whose work often led 
him into the poorest homes of the city. 

"The other day," he said, "I went to see one of 
our people who was in trouble. Her husband was 
a drunkard, and now her only son had fallen ill, 
and there was but her tired, worn-out hands for the 
double burden. 

" 'How do you get along V 



256 THE GKEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

" '0/ she replied, 'I take in washing. I've taken 
in washing for thirty years.' 

" 'Don't you ever get tired of it V 

"She looked at me simply. 'O, that's all right/ 
she answered ; 'if the Lord wants me to spend my 
life over the tubs, I'm willing.' " 

The speaker said he thought of that life — of its 
thirty years of thankless, unremitting toil, of the 
years still before her, bare of love or ease or 
pleasure, and he went home with a great lesson. 
None of the national heroes, great as they were, 
worthy of the highest honors that we can give 
them, ever seemed to him more splendid than the 
poor, unlettered woman standing so heroically in 
her hard place and willing to stand there until the 
end. 

]STow, what made that woman the hero she was % 
What gave her that power of heroism? It was 
the guard she had at her soul's door. She had 
none of this world's peace, but the peace of God 
kept guard over her heart and mind. 

This peace is the supreme mark of Christian 
character. Every other mark is superficial. 
Forms and ceremonies, however solemn and splen- 
did they may be, cannot prove to us that any man 
or woman is a Christian. The character itself 
must prove that if it is proved at all. 



THE GUARDIANSHIP OF THE SOUL 257 

Cyrus Townsend Brady, the home missionary 
author, tells us that he once baptized a little girl 
in a small town on the border of Indian Territory. 
Her father was a cattle man, the owner of enor- 
mous herds. Throughout the great West each 
cattle owner has a brand of his own for marking 
his animals, and the mavericks — for that is what 
they call young cattle born on the range — belong 
to the man who can get his branding iron on them 
first. 

This little girl had to remain away one day 
from the public school for her baptism. When she 
returned the children set upon her with hard ques- 
tions, and inquired skeptically how she was in any 
way different from what she had been before. She 
told them, using the language which had been 
spoken to her, that she had been made "A mem- 
ber of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of 
the kingdom of heaven." 

Still they gathered about her, and with the un- 
conscious cruelty of children baited her with puz- 
zling queries. Finally, when she had exhausted 
all other means, she turned upon them, her eyes 
flashing through their tears. "Well," she said, 
lapsing into the vernacular, "I will tell you. I was 
a little maverick before, and the man put Jesus's 
brand on my forehead, so when he sees me run- 
17 



258 THE GEEAT PROMISES OE THE BIBLE 

ning wild on the prairie lie will know that I am 
his little girl." 

That conveyed the idea. The children under- 
stood, and were respectfully hushed. But the out- 
ward baptism is idle unless there be the inward 
cleansing of the heart which insures the peace of 
God as the soul's abiding guest and guard. If we 
are to have constant influence as witnesses for the 
divine Lord who has redeemed us, we must so sur- 
render ourselves to God in his service that his 
peace, which passeth all understanding, shall be 
our constant guard and our credentials which no 
one can doubt. 

Every Christian should take this promise to his 
heart and go out cherishing its blessed comfort. 
The secret of peace is trust — to walk by faith when 
we cannot walk by sight. Whittier in his poem 2 
My Soul and I, states it with true insight : 

"Know well, my soul, God's hand controls 

Whate'er thou fearest; 
Round him in calmest music rolls 
Whate'er thou hearest. 

"What to thee is shadow to him is day, 

And the end he knoweth, 
And not on a hlind and aimless way 
The spirit goeth. 



THE GUAEDIANSHIP OF THE SOUL 259 

"Leaning on him, make with reverent meekness 

His own thy will, 
And with strength from him shall thy utter weakness 
Life's task fulfill; 

"And that cloud itself, which now before thee 
Lies dark in view, 
Shall with beams of light from the inner glory 
Be stricken through. 

"And like meadow mist through autumn's dawn 
Uprolling thin, 
Its thickest folds when about thee drawn 
Let sunlight in." 



260 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



XXIV 

The Promise of the Kainbow 

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it snail be for a 
token of a covenant between me and the earth. — 
Genesis ix, 13. 

And there was a rainbow round about the throne. — 
Revelation iv, 3. 

The mercy of God was never more beautifully 
shown than in the covenant of the rainbow which 
he made with Noah on Mount Ararat after the 
deluge. A moment's reflection will enable us to 
see that if it had not been for the promise coupled 
with the rainbow the whole world would have been 
startled and anxious with fear every time the 
clouds were black and the rain poured down. Ter- 
ror would have taken the place of hope, and man- 
kind would have lacked the courage and confidence 
which are necessary to progress and advancement. 
But God pointed out the rainbow on the cloud, 
the beauty of which they had no doubt rejoiced 
in from the beginning, but which hitherto had had 
no special significance, and made it the token of 
his promise never again to destroy the world with 



THE PKOMISE OF THE KAINBOW 261 



flood. And in all the years afterward, when the 
clouds were very dark, when the rain poured 
down in torrents and fear was about to arise, the 
sunshine would fall again upon the cloud as it 
retreated like a defeated army from the battlefield, 
and the rainbow would span its retreating form 
and make it glorious with promise of a brighter 
to-morrow. 

In Ezekiel we have a description of a vision 
of the throne of God, in which the prophet says: 
"As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud 
in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the 
brightness round about. This was the appearance 
of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And 
when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a 
voice of one that spake. And he said unto me, 
Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak 
unto thee." Ezekiel takes the rainbow as an indi- 
cation of God's loving thought and merciful pur- 
pose toward man. Man may stand upon his feet, 
reverently, but with self-respect, to hear the mes- 
sage of God, knowing that God's purpose is full 
of love. 

In the book of Kevelation the aged John gives 
us in his vision of the throne of God a similar 
picture. He tells us that he saw "a rainbow round 
about the throne" which was in color like an 



262 THE GEE AT PEOMISES OE THE BIBLE 

emerald. This rainbow is a token of the covenant 
of mercy which God has entered into with all who 
accept Jesus Christ as their Saviour. The rainbow 
round about the throne is a pledge that mercy 
shall always be as a bow of promise on the power 
of God. God's power shall be girt about with 
mercy. The beautiful bow of his love shall span 
his authority and his justice. 

What, then, is the message of the rainbow to us ? 
What is its promise ? What is its teaching ? In 
the first place, it ought to teach us that the opti- 
mist, and not the pessimist, has the key to human 
life. There is a bright side to the clouds of exist- 
ence. There are clouds, but on one side of the 
cloud the sun is shining and the rainbow spans 
it with hope. 

Poor Thomas Carlyle, dyspeptic and disgrun- 
tled, once looked up at the stars and said, with a 
growl, "It is a sad sight !" But a little girl looked 
up at the same sight and said, "Mamma, if the 
wrong side of heaven is so fine, how very beautiful 
the right side must be !" 

An old minister was much interested in a little 
child of his flock who was ill. She was a pet of 
his, and he was accustomed to have joyous times 
with her. During her illness he called, and spoke 
to her mother at the top of the stairs, rather gloom- 



THE PROMISE OF THE RAINBOW 263 

ily, "How is the child V 9 " 'Peak as 'oo do when 
'oo're laughing!" came back the voice of the sick 
child, who had overheard. And it is when we 
speak as we do when the heart is full of hope and 
courage and confidence that we speak with the 
most sanity. 

When Martin Luther was ill, and suffering the 
greatest pain, he did not lose this optimistic cour- 
age. Between his groans he said: "These pains 
and troubles here are like the type which the 
printers set: as they look now, we have to read 
them backward, and they seem to have no sense or 
meaning in them; but yonder, when the Lord 
prints us off in the life to come, we shall find 
that they make brave reading." As Christians 
we must not live without constant appreciation of 
the token and pledge of the rainbow. Our lives 
are spanned by the rainbow of God's mercy to us, 
and we must give the hopefulness of it full play in 
our hearts, as well as in our conversation and life. 
The poet utters a true note when she says: 

"Talk Happiness. The world is sad enough 
Without your woes. No path is wholly rough; 
book for the places that are smooth and clear, 
And speak of those to rest the weary ear 
Of earth, so hurt by one continuous strain 
Of human discontent and grief and pain. 



264 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

"Talk Faith. The world is better off without 
Your uttered ignorance and morbid doubt. 
If you have faith in God, or man, or self, 
Say so; if not, push back upon the shelf 
Of silence your thoughts till faith shall come." 

Let us look at some of the clouds where we may 
surely find the rainbow of promise. One of these 
is the cloud of business vicissitudes and difficulty 
— and how common that cloud is. On every hand 
we behold it. It is a cloud that may come to any- 
one. There are no investments so safe that war or 
business panic or death may not suddenly bring 
that cloud of care upon the horizon. But God's 
rainbow spans the cloud for the man or the woman 
who trusts in him. Elijah had terrible clouds of 
trouble of that sort. He was exiled without funds, 
but God sent a rainbow in the shape of the ravens 
to minister to his needs, and afterward the humble 
family of the widow of Sarepta. The cloud was 
black enough for Jonah, but, even dark as it was, 
it, too, had its rainbow of mercy. David gave 
as his experience that from the time he was a 
shepherd lad until he was an old gray-headed king 
he had never known God to forsake the righteous 
or to fail to take care of his children. There have 
been many indeed who have found in poverty and 
in hard and trying experiences in life a gracious 



THE PKOMISE OF THE KAINBOW 265 

confidence in God, a joyous communion with 
Christ, and a sensitive and instant faith that they 
had never known before. If I speak to any who 
are in the very throes of care concerning their 
present situation or future prospects in a business 
way, I want to say to you : Cling to your confidence 
in God; stay your heart on him. Just as surely 
as the rainbow follows the storm and spans the 
clouds when the sun shines on them after rain, 
God means mercy and good to you, and if you will 
allow him he will make his mercy preciously con- 
scious to your heart. 

There is the rainbow that spans the cloud of 
sacred grief, that deep heart sorrow that comes 
from the separation from those whom we love. 
O, the loneliness of it, the deep yearning of the 
soul, and the crying out of the heart like a child 
for its mother. I would not underrate it or be- 
little it, or say to any who are in sorrow or grief 
for those "whom they have loved long since and 
lost awhile" to try to forget their loved ones. That 
is only to insult true grief. We do not want to 
forget. God does not want us to forget. It 
is not good for us to forget. We are not beasts 
of the field to eat and drink and die in indif- 
ference. We are immortals, and our loved ones 
who have gone from us are immortal, and the 



266 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

parting is not for long, and the reunion shall be 
for eternity. Therefore not forgetfulness, bnt 
memory, sweet and fragrant, is the secret of peace 
and of comfort. And that is the bow that spans 
the cloud of sorrow. 

David found the real secret of peace. When his 
child died he went and ordered a meal to be set 
before him, and ate with his usual zest and appe- 
tite. His servants were astonished and said to 
him: "We do not understand you. For days, 
while the child has been sick, you would not eat 
nor drink, and your whole thought was taken up 
with the child. But now that the child is dead 
you are ready to take your food." And David 
answered them with greatest sanity when he said, 
in substance: "I acted but naturally. While the 
child was yet alive I thought it was possible that 
it might be healed. I was not sure then that God 
meant to take the child from me. But now that 
the child is dead, why should I fast ? The child 
shall not return to me, but I shall go to him." Ah, 
in that last sentence was David's bow in the cloud. 
The rainbow across the cloud was the hope of 
immortality. 

Only yesterday I went into a home where only 
one remained out of a family group. Father, 
mother, brother, sisters, all were gone, and just 



THE PROMISE OF THE RAINBOW 267 

one left that bore the family name, and though 
there were grief and tears, and a feeling of loneli- 
ness, yet my heart was inspired and cheered by the 
sublime faith which I found there. "Ah," said 
that good woman, "all that I had on earth has 
gone home now to God. The world seems very 
lonely, and I sometimes stretch out my arms, and 
feel how empty they are, but instantly I rejoice 
when I remember their farewells, and the memory 
of all their loving and sweet lives comes back to 
me, and I know they are with God. They cannot 
come back to me, but ere long I shall go to them, 
and I know they wait for me there." That was 
her rainbow across the clouds of sorrow and death, 
of grief and trouble, and it was a bow that was 
beautiful and filled her heart with peace. 

There is a rainbow across the clouds of sin. 
Sin makes a dark cloud over a man's head, a cloud 
full of black portents, full of anger and threat- 
ening. There can be no doubt that the cloud has 
doom in it, and that for unrepented sin there is 
no hope offered in God's Word. But across that 
cloud so angry and threatening, which has in it 
such a deluge of doom, there is a rainbow which is 
a token of the infinite mercy of God. Though 
a man who covers his sin shall not prosper, that 
rainbow is the perpetual pledge that "Whoso con- 



268 THE GKEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

fesseth and forsaketh his sins shall have mercy." 
And, thank God, that is true. However dark the 
cloud, it may be turned away by the mercy of God 
through Jesus Christ, the divine Saviour. 

Dr. Yatman, the evangelist, once preached on 
that text in a little Southwestern town, and im- 
mediately afterward went back to the hotel and to 
his room. He was tired and lay down on the bed. 
A few minutes later a cowboy, with a revolver in 
his belt, came into the room, turned and locked 
the door, and threw the key on the floor. 

Yatman was rather startled at the performance, 
but the young fellow soon showed that he had 
nothing to fear. He wanted to know of Dr. Yat- 
man if there was any hope of forgiveness for a 
man who had deliberately stolen several thousand 
dollars from another who had trusted him. 

Yatman raised himself up in bed and asked: 
"Who is the man ?" 

"Who is the man ?" 

"I, great heavens — I am the one !" 

"Tell me about it — tell all out, and if I can help 
you I will. If I cannot, I know One who can." 

Then out of a broken heart his rough visitor 
told a sad tale of sin. He was at the head of a 
great ranch which belonged to an English owner. 
As trusted agent and manager, he had stolen over 



THE PKOMISE OF THE RAINBOW 269 

thirteen thousand dollars. Stealing makes a man 
a thief, and the truth of the sermon had shown 
him his real self. It was not so much the money 
he had stolen as the thought of what the stealing 
had made him — a thief ! Over and over again he 
repeated the words in horror: "I am a thief! I 
am a thief! What shall I do ?" 

Yatman told him : "Repent ; restore the money ; 
ask God for mercy. Let him give you a new heart 
and a good life. Let him make you good and keep 
you so." 

He was able to pay back all he had taken. It 
was his own proposition to add the interest. They 
figured it all out at six per cent — fourteen thou- 
sand seven hundred and fifty dollars in round 
figures. 

The two had prayer together, and when they 
rose from their knees Yatman said : "Isn't it good 
to be made good ?" 

"Yes, better than gold," said he. He had found 
the rainbow of mercy round about the throne. 
Some of you need to see that rainbow to-night. 
Over your head also hangs that terrible cloud of 
sin. But there is a rainbow spanning the cloud 
for you, too, if you will repent of your sins and, 
forsaking them, accept the salvation which Jesus 
Christ purchased for you with his own blood. 



270 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



XXV 

The Promised Measure of Keward 

Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, 
pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, 
shall men give into your bosom. For with the same 
measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you 
again. — Luke vi, 38. 

Christ speaks here as one having authority, 
one who knows human life and can reveal the 
secret laws by which it is governed. Christ's life 
on earth was very narrow and he had had but 
little opportunity to observe the widely diversified 
conditions under which men lived; and yet he 
announced the great laws of life so clearly and so 
correctly that they are the great court of appeal 
to-day. !Na man who has ever lived has said so 
many wise things about the science of living as 
Jesus Christ. You can compress all he ever said 
about it into a small pamphlet, but ponderous 
tomes, indeed, whole libraries full of books, have 
been written and are being written to elaborate 
those simple epigrammatic declarations which the 
young Peasant of Nazareth made about life, 



MEASURE OF REWARD 271 



This tremendous declaration made in our text, 
that the returns of life shall be measured by the 
outgo, that our own half -bushel will be used to 
measure back to us the result, that we shall get 
what we give, is true in whatever way we take it 
■ — in relation to ourselves, to our fellow men, or 
to God. 

In the first place, this law of life laid down by 
Jesus is true in our relation to our fellow men. 
They will give us back what we give. They will 
adopt our standard of measurement in dealing 
with us. It is like the little boy and his first 
experience with the echo. He came in one day 
and declared to his mother that there was a boy 
in the garden who mocked him. 

"How do you mean, J oseph ?" said his mother. 

"Why," said the child, "I was calling out, 'Ho!' 
and this boy said, 'Ho !' So I said to him, 'Who 
are you?' and he answered, 'Who are you?' I 
said, 'What is your name?' He said, 'What is 
your name V And I said to him, 'Why don't you 
show yourself ?' He said, 'Show yourself V And 
I jumped over the ditch, and I ran into the woods 
where I had heard his voice, and I could not find 
him, and I came back, and said, 'If you don't come 
out I will punch your head !' And he said, 'I will 
punch your head !' " 



272 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

The little boy's mother was wise, and she drew 
him to her side and said, "Ah, Joseph ! If you had 
said, 'I love you/ he would have said, '1 love you.' 
If you had said, 'Your voice is sweet/ he would 
have said, 'Your voice is sweet.' Whatever you 
said to him he would have said back to you." 

And so it is with our fellow men. In their 
dealings with us all through life this great law 
will hold good. What we say to others they will, 
in the long run, say back to us. 

History is full of illustrations of that justice, 
which men call "poetic justice/' where a man, 
even in this world, gets back full measure and run- 
ning over into his bosom of that which he has 
measured out to others. It was the Eegent Morton 
who introduced into Scotland that horrible instru- 
ment of torture and death from the Spanish In- 
quisition known as the "Maiden," and he himself 
was hugged to death by the cruel machine. Hainan 
was hanged on the gallows which he had built for 
Mordecai. 

On the other hand, the law is just as true in the 
return of good for good. I remember that this 
is the Emerson Centenary Sunday, and in that 
sweet-spirited philosopher we have a happy illus- 
tration of our theme. Emerson once said : "Every 
man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat 



THE MEASUEE OF EEWAED 273 

him. But a day comes when he begins to care 
that he do not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes 
well. He has changed his market-cart into a 
chariot of the sun. What a day dawns when we 
have taken to heart the doctrine of faith ! To pre- 
fer, as a better investment, being to doing; being 
to seeming; logic to rhythm and to display; the 
year to the day ; the life to the year ; character to 
performance ; — and have come to know that justice 
will be done us; and if our genius is slow, the 
term will be long." 

Emerson gave out to his fellow men marvelous 
sweetness in spirit and word and deed. And even 
while he lived they gave back to him full measure 
in response. Dr. Olin A. Curtis tells us that he 
heard the last public lecture that Emerson ever 
delivered. It was in the Old South Meetinghouse 
in Boston. The great philosopher was reading 
from his manuscript, when he suddenly stopped 
and was in evident confusion. At this his daugh- 
ter stood up and said, slowly and very distinctly, 
"Father, I think you will find the missing sheet 
in your pocket." Quickly, and yet with a manner 
of deliberation, Emerson put his right hand into 
his coat pocket and brought out the sheet, he looked 
it over, and, with a peculiar nod of satisfaction, 
placed it on the desk. Then he turned toward his 
18 



274 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

daughter and smiled. Curtis declares that that 
smile was as beautiful a thing as he ever saw on 
a human face. It was kindness, gratitude, love 
— all in a look. The entire audience broke into 
cheers. 

Perhaps no man of his day received so much 
genuine love along with his fame, from so widely 
diversified an audience, as the late Professor 
Henry Drummond. Men and women not only 
admired him, but there was a certain touch of 
tender love in it everywhere. And that was true 
to this law that we are studying. Drummond gave 
men love, and he got it back, full measure, pressed 
down, and running over. 

If you would go up into the Highlands of Scot- 
land you could find there in a certain cottage a 
withered rose. Protected by glass and neatly 
framed, it holds the place of honor in the best 
room; and when the white-haired mother looks at 
it she is reminded not only of the son who died 
far away among strangers, but with grateful love 
she remembers always Henry Drummond, who 
sent her that precious rose. 

Her boy went to Mentone, in France, hoping 
there to find health and strength that could never 
come to him in the bleak Highlands of Scotland. 
The mother could not go with him; it was very 



THE MEASURE OF KEWAKD 275 



difficult to find money for his expenses. He did 
not get well, and when at last he must die among 
strangers the mother could not even go to bid him 
good-bye. Her heart was broken up there in her 
cottage home in Scotland as she thought of her boy, 
laid in his lonely grave in a far-off land by the 
hand of strangers. 

[Now, Henry Drummond did not know the boy, 
but incidentally he heard of his death, and his 
quick sympathy went out to the lonely old mother 
back in Scotland. A little later, when he went to 
Mentone, he did not forget her. He sought out 
the grave of the Scotch laddie, and, picking a rose 
blooming there, sent it to the mother, with a tender 
little letter, full of description of the place, such 
as he knew would make a picture before which a 
mother could stand and look and be comforted. It 
was a little thing to do, and yet it was a great thing. 
It was love, and he got love back in return. 

We make all sorts of excuses for ourselves for 
living lives that are hard and unloving, but we 
must remember that no excuses can save us from 
the certain harvest that we shall reap from the 
seeds sown. Many people are like the little girl 
who, on the morning of the first of April, sitting 
at the breakfast table, said to her father, "I am 
going to catch a lot of girls to-day ; I have studied 



276 THE 'GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

up a whole lot of tricks; but I hope no one will 
catch me." 

The father said, "Don't you remember, darling, 
what I told you about the golden rule, 'Do unto 
others as ye would that they should do unto you' ? 
And if you do not want them to catch you, ought 
you to catch them V 9 

That seemed a puzzle to the child, and she sat 
still a minute or so, and then said, "Say, papa, 
I don't believe Jesus meant the golden rule for 
the first day of April." 

So there are other people who try to think that 
J esus did not mean the golden rule for society, or 
for the stock market, or any number of social and 
business and political snarls where men and women 
are tempted to live cunning and critical and greedy 
lives. But remember that excuses will not save us 
from the harvest. Sow cunning, and you reap 
cunning ; sow greed, and greed will pay you back ; 
sow social insincerity and display, and it will come 
back in your own half-bushel, as cold and insincere 
and hard as you have given. 

Our text is true in the relations between our 
own souls and God. God gives back to us, in run- 
ning-over measure, all that we give unselfishly for 
the blessing of our fellow men and through devo- 
tion to him. 



THE MEASUEE OF EEWAED 277 



This is true, first, in our own religions expe^ 
rience. A man hired a house of another who, up 
to that time, had always lived alone in his own 
house. The tenant moved his furniture in, sup- 
posing, of course, he was to occupy the entire 
house. But after the furniture had heen moved in 
he found that the owner had reserved for himself 
one small room. The tenant objected to this, and 
after some discussion told the landlord that unless 
he moved out, he would. He refused to go, so he 
lost a tenant. There are many people who are 
living starved and joyless Christian lives for the 
same reason. They have made a public confession 
of Christ and have united with his church; but 
there are one or more rooms in their heart that 
they have held back from God, and they will not 
give him the key to those chambers. If we treat 
our heavenly Father that way he cannot bestow 
upon us the blessings which he longs to give us. 
But if we will turn all the keys over to him he 
will then give us all the blessings which he has 
bestowed upon his saints in any age of the world. 
If you are having little joy in your Christian life 
you may be sure it is because you are giving up 
very little to God. God has never yet cheated a 
human soul, and he will not cheat you. It seems 
strange that we should be satisfied to live a single 



278 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

week, nay, a single day, without seeking the fullest 
and most satisfactory friendship that it is possible 
for us to have with Jesus Christ. When we con- 
sider that such friendship is not only the greatest 
comfort that can come to us here in this world, 
hut that it is absolutely essential to our joy and 
peace in the world to come, how strange it is that 
we should delay entering into a perfect communion 
and fellowship with our divine Lord. He assures 
us that this, too, is in harmony with this law an- 
nounced in our text. If we confess Christ on earth, 
before men, he will confess us in heaven in the 
presence of his Father and the holy angels. If 
we make much of Jesus here, making him Lord 
over all in our hearts, giving him full sway in 
our lives, then he will make much of us in heaven, 
and we shall not be strangers in that realm of im- 
mortality, but shall find our mansion awaiting 
our occupancy. Life is so short on earth; we 
are only tenants at will here, and no man 
can tell what day he shall be called away; 
hence it behooves us to enter into such friend- 
ship with Jesus, and be on such terms with 
him, that any day or hour the call may come 
our place in heaven will be ready for us, 
and we shall rest in perfect assurance that 
our divine Saviour and Lord is waiting with 



THE MEASURE OF REWARD 279 

smiling face and welcoming words to receive 
us. If we live in that watchful and confi- 
dent spirit we shall be able to sing: 

"I shall see my blessed Master 

Face to face, 
In the glory that is coming, 

Face to face. 
Oh, my heart leaps out to meet him, 
I shall hear him, I shall greet him, 

I shall see him face to face. 

"When I greet my blessed Master 

Face to face, 
And I commune in the glory 

Face to face, 
I Shall thank him that he sought me, 
That to his fair home he brought me, 

When I greet him face to face. 

"How I love to think I'll see him 

Face to face, 
And I know he'll commune with me 

Face to face; 
On the banks of that calm river, 
With my Master walking ever, 

I shall gaze upon his face." 



280 THE GEE AT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



XXVI 

A Man who Never Staggered at the Prom- 
ises or God 

He staggered not at the promise of God through un- 
belief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and 
being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he 
was able also to perform. — Romans iv, 20, 21. 

The doubter is always a staggerer. He pro- 
ceeds, if he does proceed at all, like a man who 
is imperfect in his vision and who is anticipating 
disaster at every step. He stumbles on the way 
and expects to stumble still worse at the next step. 

This is a very unique figure which we are to 
study. The word "stagger" in its various forms 
is used altogether only five times in the entire 
Bible, and in the other four cases it is used to 
describe the attempts to walk which are made by 
a drunken man. Now a drunken man staggers 
because the power to will and govern his limbs has 
been for the time being paralyzed by strong drink. 
He is helpless, comparatively, because he has not 
the power in his brain to make his feet go straight. 
He has enough power left to order them to go, but 



A MAN WHO NEVER STAGGEES 281 

not enough to make them do it in the right way, 
and so he staggers, and perhaps there is no more 
pitiable sight ever witnessed than to see a big, 
strong, mature man who ought to be by nature 
in the fullness of his powers, so under the bondage 
of strong drink that he staggers helplessly down 
the street, an object of pity and shame to his fellow 
men. 

Paul must have had a picture like that in his 
mind when he wrote the text. To him the man 
who hesitates and fails to accept the promises of 
God and act upon them is a staggerer like a 
drunken man. He is all the time divided in his 
judgment in regard to his conduct. He feels that 
he ought to serve God, and yet he doubts and hesi- 
tates and staggers along so that his knowledge of 
God's Word is of no real value to him. 

Paul points out in contrast to the staggerer 
the splendid illustration furnished by the life of 
Abraham. Here was a man who never staggered 
at the promises of God. He believed God and 
trusted him, and the result was that he lived a 
pure and courageous life, walking right on across 
the deserts of earth till he reached the realms of 
glory. 

When God promised that in his seed should all 
the nations of the earth be blessed he was childless, 



282 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

and the world looking on saw no possibility that 
this could be realized, but Abraham staggered not. 
He left the fulfillment of the promise to God. 
When God called Abraham to make his journey 
to Mount Moriah and sacrifice on the altar his only 
son Isaac, who had been born to him in his old 
age, and who was the only token, visible, of the 
fulfillment of God's promise, he did not stagger 
at the divine word, but made his journey, climbed 
the mountain, built the altar, and stayed his hand 
only at the voice of God's angel. 

If you follow the life of Abraham, you will 
find that the secret of this steadiness of faith lay 
in the fact that he did not assume to be himself 
responsible for the fulfillment of God's promise. 
He took no anxiety to himself on that account. 
He did his own duty. He obeyed implicitly the 
command which God laid upon him, and then he 
left all the results to God. That is the way to 
go with certain step through the darkness and 
perplexity of this world. 

A group of men were talking one day about the 
burdens of duty, when one of them declared that 
they were sometimes too heavy to be borne. 

"Not," said another, "if you carry only your 
own burden, and don't try to take God's work out 
of his hands. Last year I crossed the Atlantic 



A MAN "WHO NEVER STAGGERS 283 



with one of the most skillful and faithful captains 
of the great liners. We had a terrific storm, during 
■which for thirty-eight hours he remained on the 
bridge, striving to save his ship and his passen- 
gers. When the danger was over, I said to him, 
'It must be a terrible thought at such a time that 
you are responsible for the lives of over a thousand 
human beings.' 

" 'No/ he said, solemnly, 'I am not responsible 
for the life of one man on this ship. My respon- 
sibility is to run the ship with all the skill and 
faithfulness possible to any man. God himself is 
responsible for all the rest.' " Now, that is a 
lesson that you and I want to learn. All our 
trouble about the seeming improbability of the 
promises of God being realized in any particular 
case vanishes when we turn it over to God and do 
our own duty simply and confidingly and let God 
take care of the fulfillment of his promise. That 
is the path of reverence and faith, and it is the 
only path of peace. 

Abraham kept himself in this courageous and 
confident frame of mind by living a life of prayer 
and worship. Wherever he went, there he built 
an altar to God and worshiped him. So consistent 
and persistent was he in this that through all the 
East he became known, and is known to this day, 



284 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

after thousands of years have passed away, as "the 
friend of God." It colored his life; it distin- 
guished his reputation; he loomed up largely 
among the nations as a man of constant prayer. 
This by no means suggests that Abraham was a 
monkish kind of man who lived the life of a 
hermit, or that he was a goody-goody sort of a 
man who was always talking pious platitudes. No, 
indeed. He was a keen, broad-minded, business 
man. He had hundreds of servants and large 
flocks of sheep and cattle and camels and carried 
on an immense business through the aid of cara- 
vans, which were the railroads of that age. He 
was a very rich man, highly honored, whose word 
was law to many people, and he was judge and 
governor, priest and counselor, and father to all 
his people. He had to decide every day on hun- 
dreds of questions that related to matters of busi- 
ness, as well as domestic, social, and tribal affairs. 
And in all these things Abraham was a man full 
of wisdom and common sense. Yet, rich as he 
was, powerful as he was, keen-headed as he was 
in business, so genuine was his religion, so earnest 
was his purpose to serve God, so keen and true was 
his faith in God, so prayerful was his spirit, that 
when men talked about him they did not speak 
of him as they did about the rich fool, and call 



A MAIS' WHO NEVEE STAGGEES 285 



him "Abraham, the rich/' "Abraham, the man 
with the largest flocks and herds in the East," but 
thej called him "Abraham, the friend of God." 

I am sure we need to learn this lesson. There 
is always the danger that we will allow our busi- 
ness, which engrosses us so completely six days in 
the week, to narrow our minds and hearts until 
we become creatures of the one thought, the one 
business, and lose the breadth of soul and the ele- 
vation of spirit of those who make the service of 
God the greatest thing in their lives. 

In a book published many years ago by George 
William Curtis, entitled Prue and I, there is a 
chapter called "Mr. Titbottom's Spectacles." The 
magical quality of these spectacles was that, when 
their owner looked through them at people, he 
ceased to see persons as they ordinarily appeared 
in the street ; he saw their real essential character 
personified. Wonderful were the revelations that 
were made. He looked at one man, and saw nothing 
but a ledger; another was simply a billiard cue; 
another, a jockey cap; another, a pack of cards. 
He looked at women: one was a broomstick; an- 
other, a fashion plate ; a third, a needle, and so on. 

Mr. Curtis's pleasantry suggests a great truth, 
that it is possible for us to give ourselves with 
such devotion to our occupation, or to our physical 



286 THE GEEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

or social ambitions, or to our pleasures, that we 
shall develop only that side of our natures, and 
thus lose the greatest blessings that can come to 
us, those which are connected with our spiritual 
natures. It is said that Darwin, the great sci- 
entist, did not come to know that there was any 
pleasure in music for him until near the end of 
his life, and that when he made the discovery he 
wept bitter tears, saying that it was the mistake 
of his life that he had not developed that side of 
his nature. Surely there are multitudes who are 
making the greatest mistake of life in not develop- 
ing their powers of faith and hope and love through 
the sincere worship of God. 

Abraham's life of prayer and his unstaggering 
acceptance of God's promises gave him keen spir- 
itual vision. Wherever he went in that land of 
deserts he was never out of sight of "the city which 
hath foundations, whose builder and maker is 
God." He was only a pilgrim in the Orient ; his 
chief thoughts and his happiest meditations were 
concerning the heavens beyond. He was on the 
way there, and it was far more important that he 
should be equipped for heaven, where he was to 
finally reside, than that he should be well adapted 
for the lands through which he traveled, where he 
was only a pilgrim. 



A MAN WHO NEVER STAGGEES 287 



When I was a little boy in Oregon a young man 
bade farewell to his father and mother in Indiana, 
and came out to Oregon and made his home there. 
He was an industrious young fellow, and soon be- 
came very prosperous. After a while he sent for 
his brother to come out and live with him, and later 
he sent for his sister and her husband. One by 
one the entire family emigrated to Oregon except 
the old father and mother. And do you wonder 
that the father became far more interested in Ore- 
gon than in Indiana, where he had lived all his 
days ? The old man searched greedily for every 
paper and book and pamphlet that he could find 
about Oregon. He could talk to his neighbors by 
the hour about the climate and the soil and the 
forests and the mining interests of Oregon. And 
so it went on, till one day the old man got a letter 
from his eldest son, saying, "I am coming for you, 
father." After that the old gentleman was more 
interested than ever. If he had talked much of 
Oregon before, he now talked of but little else. 
To his farm hands, to his neighbors, to everybody 
he sang one song; it was a song of that sunset 
land where his children were, and to which his son 
was coming to guide him. So if, like Abraham, 
our citizenship is in heaven, and we have clear 
vision of the home God is building for us there, 



288 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

and keen appreciation of the words of Jesus, "I 
will come again, and receive yon nnto myself ; that 
where I am, there ye may be also," we shall, as 
the years go on, think more of heaven by far than 
of earth. 

The other day in my pastoral work I called 
upon an old lady who is suffering very much from 
rheumatism, which has bent her poor body nearly 
double and twisted and distorted her hands until 
they are a sad sight. And yet she is cheerful and 
happy and full of confidence in God. Tried and 
troubled as she is, she does not stagger at God's 
promises. As I sat by her side I said to her, 
"What a lovely thing it is to know that there is 
no rheumatism in heaven." A smile of infinite 
peace spread over her face. "0," said she, "you 
do not know what a joy that is to me. Again 
and again I comfort myself with the promise that 
there will be no pain there. And nights when I 
cannot sleep I just revel in delightful anticipa- 
tions of the day when I shall be free from the 
suffering body, and I shall meet my husband, and 
my children, and all my loved ones, and never, 
never leave them again. Some people are afraid 
to think about death, but I just love to think 
about it, and it is the best treat I ever have to 
picture my meeting with my dear ones in heaven." 



A MAN WHO NEVEE STAGGEES 289 

To have this clear and beautiful vision of 
spiritual things we must live Abraham's life of 
prayer and faith. If we live a low, earthly, 
groveling life we must expect that its dust and 
smoke and soot will constantly annoy us. While 
we work in the midst of the things of this world, 
our purposes, our sacrifices, our prayers must rise 
up into the sublime realm of faith and love. 

There was trouble with the kitchen range in a 
certain house, and an expert was sent for to rectify 
it. The man came and looked it over, and said: 
"The fault is in the chimney. A stove has, of 
course, no draft in itself; it is only its connec- 
tion with the flue that makes the fire burn and 
the smoke ascend, and the higher the chimney 
the stronger the draft. At shops and foundries, 
where fierce fires are needed, they run their stacks 
up to a great height. Your stove clogs, chokes, 
and smokes because your chimney is too low. You 
must build up higher." 

Our spiritual lives are affected in the same 
way. The fires divine burn low and choke too 
easily; the heavenly love and aspiration is often 
clogged by life's daily wear and fret; holy faith 
seems to smolder instead of flaming forth with 
force enough and heat enough to carry away life's 
troubles, because the zest, the enthusiasm, the 
19 



290 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

draft of our spiritual life is insufficient. You 
must build higher. You must build with Bible 
reading; with secret prayer; with much medita- 
tion upon holy things; with kind and loving and 
self-sacrificing service of your fellow men. You 
must get into fellowship with God and keep there 
by loving worship and service, and there shall 
come to be a draft to your spiritual living that 
will carry everything before it. 



THE PKOMISE OF VICTORY 291 



XXVII 

The Promise of Victory 

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors 
through him that loved us. — Romans viii, 37. 

This is an utterance intended to encourage and 
inspire men and women who are in the furnace 
of trial. Paul has been describing the terrible 
persecution the Christians of that day had to face. 
He has been recounting some of the fierce trials 
through which they had to pass. To the Chris- 
tian of Paul's time loyalty to Christ was likely 
any day to mean tribulation, or distress, or perse- 
cution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or death 
by the sword ; yet he declares that in experiences 
like these they were conquerors. As Christ in 
the wilderness, fiercely assaulted by the devil, was 
still a conqueror, and though he came away weak 
and hungry in body, came strong in soul, buoyant 
in spirit, having fellowship with angels, so the 
Christians of Paul's day, fiercely beset as they 
were and suffering many things in Christ's name, 
were still victorious, retaining their peace and 
honor. 



292 THE GREAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

Our study ought to have great comfort for us. 
If the Christians of the first century, tried and 
persecuted as they were, could pass through the 
fire without losing their Christianity, and under 
such stress of suffering could maintain their joy 
and peace, and against such fearful odds could 
so make conquest of circumstances that they 
counted either the stake or the cross a thing to be 
desired and to be rejoiced over, surely we, in our 
time, may trust God to take care of us, and in 
every temptation to make a way for our escape. 
I may be speaking to some one who is at this 
moment beset by threats of danger. Temptations 
loom up about you and cause you to fear for the 
safety of your Christian character. If you will 
trust God there is no danger in your situation. 
If you forget him you will be trampled upon and 
overthrown. But so long as you trust in God and 
keep in communication with him you may 
overcome all opposition that will be brought 
against you. 

A gentleman went one day to visit the United 
States Mint in the city of San Francisco. He had 
a friend who was cashier of the assay office, and 
was invited to inspect that part of the institution. 
He was greatly impressed with the enormous 
quantity of gold and silver which he saw on every 



THE PROMISE OF VICTORY 



293 



hand, and remarked to his friend, the cashier, "I 
should think you would be afraid of robbers here ; 
it seems to me it would be a very easy matter for 
a man to hold a pistol to your head while others 
would seize the treasure." The words were 
scarcely out of his mouth when a number of uni- 
formed guards had him in their clutches, and he 
was being roughly dragged from the room. Then 
the cashier raised his hand as a signal to stop, 
and said, "That's enough ; I only wanted to show 
him I was amply protected." While his friend 
had been speaking of the danger the cashier, un- 
seen by his visitor, had pressed his finger on a 
button, and the guards, who were always near, 
though hidden, instantly appeared in the room. 

Prayer is an electric signal system, a system of 
wireless telegraphy, by which the tempted soul 
is able instantly to summon legions of angels to 
its defense. As the angels of the Lord encamped 
around Elisha; as they ministered to Jesus in 
the wilderness, and in the garden of Gethsemane ; 
as they came to lead Peter out of prison, so they 
still are God's messengers to the heirs of salvation, 
and every Christian, however humble his posi- 
tion, however surrounded by difficulties, may say 
with perfect assurance, "They that be for me are 
more than they that be against me." 



294 THE GBEAT PEOMISES OP THE BIBLE 

There is something very fascinating about 
Paul's statement here concerning the kind of con- 
quest the Christian shall make : "Nay, in all these 
things we are more than conquerors." It is not 
enough to say that the Christian conquers his 
enemies. He does more than that. There have 
been victories on many a hard-fought field where 
the victor paid so great a price for his victory 
that he could only weep over it after it was ac- 
complished. When the English won Quebec it 
was at cost of the life of the intrepid and glori- 
ous Wolfe, who died as the news of victory came 
to his failing ears. Many a general has felt after 
winning a battle that the immense loss of brave sol- 
diers rendered it almost worse than a defeat. But 
the Christian loses nothing in the fight. Instead, 
he gains by every struggle, however intense and 
severe it may be. He becomes a better soldier, 
a nobler man, with every conquest, and so he is 
more than a conqueror since he not only wins his 
victory, but comes out of every battle stronger in 
every way than when he entered it. 

There is something enthusiastic about this idea 
of Christianity. If a man looks upon his religion 
as he does upon insurance which he hates to pay, 
and does so only because he dare not do other- 
wise, regarding it only as the question of saving 



THE PEOMISE OF VICTORY 295 



a soul from eternal disaster at the last, lie will not 
get much enthusiasm and joy out of his religious 
faith. But if he throws his whole heart and soul 
into the contest, with unreserved faith in God, 
and with whole-hearted devotion and love to his 
Saviour, expecting the largest and noblest suc- 
cess, then he is more than a conqueror, for he shall 
not only save his soul, but under God he shall 
develop a soul worth saving. If we trust God 
for large things he will not disappoint us. 

A traveling man with only a moderate income 
had a daughter who was in her last term at the 
grammar school. He said to her, "If you grad- 
uate with the highest honors, and read the vale- 
dictory at the closing exercises at the school, I'll 
give you a watch." Sure enough, after a little 
while, they received word from the principal that 
she had been appointed valedictorian. [Now, the 
father was not getting a large salary, and he had 
had in his mind an inexpensive chatelaine watch, 
such as some of her young friends carried; but 
one day he happened to overhear her telling some 
of her school friends that "Papa is going to give 
me a watch like Aunt Lizzie's." That was an 
expensive timepiece, but immediately the father 
said to himself, "I'll get her a watch like her 
aunt's if I have to go without my lunch for a time 



296 THE GBEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

to make up the difference. I cannot disappoint 
the child's faith in me." 

And so it is sure that God will not withhold 
from us any good thing that we have the faith to 
trust him for. You remember how Jesus said 
to some who came to him, "According to your 
faith be it unto you." The path of the "more 
than conqueror" is the path of faith and trust in 
the infinite willingness of God to bestow blessings 
upon his children. 

Paul put it very clearly that all the Christian's 
victories come to him through the atoning love of 
Jesus Christ. "We are more than conquerors 
through him that loved us." We have no victory 
except in Jesus. The disciples on that stormy 
night on the lake, when they were about to perish, 
had victory and were more than conquerors in the 
hushed waves and the peaceful coming to land, 
but it was through the loving Christ who came to 
them through the storm and commanded the wind 
to cease and the waves to be still. 

Ignatius, who was martyred in the year 107, 
said : "Let fire and the cross, let wild beasts, let all 
the malice of the devil come upon me ; only may 
I enjoy Jesus Christ. It is better for me to die 
for Christ than to reign over the ends of the 
earth. Stand firm," he added, "as an anvil when 



THE PKOMISE OF VICTORY 297 



it is beaten upon. It is part of a brave combatant 
to be wounded and yet to overcome." Christ was 
to him a friend nearer and more real than any 
earthly companion. 

The Christian's fatal blunder is when he lets 
his friendship with Christ grow cold. A Chris- 
tian man visited a friend who was building a new 
house. The host took him through a part of the 
unfinished rooms, and told him what they were 
to be used for when finished. He pointed out the 
dining room, and the parlor, and the chambers for 
the different members of the family. Coming to 
a small room on the second floor, he said, "This 
is the Lord's room, dedicated to him — my closet, 
a place where I can come to worship God." The 
man was at the time living very close to Jesus, 
and his visitor was rejoiced that he was to have 
a room of this kind. 

Months after the same visitor came again; his 
friend was now living in the house, which had been 
finished. During their conversation in the early 
part of his visit his host asked him to pray for 
him, for he felt that he was not living as he ought 
to live, and that he was drifting away from the 
Christian life. In the afternoon the owner of the 
house took his friend through the house again, that 
he might see how it looked now that it was fin- 



298 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



ished. As they passed the little room which was 
to be dedicated to God the friend pushed the door 
open and saw that it was filled with pieces of fur- 
niture, rolls of old carpet, joints of stovepipe, and 
various things that there was no use for in other 
rooms. There was not a place left big enough for 
one to kneel. He turned away with a sad heart. 
Toward sunset the two men went out for a walk, 
and during that walk the visitor said to his host, 
"My brother, you asked me to pray for you ; I'll 
do it ; but I haven't much hope my prayer will be 
answered until you clean out that room and use 
it for the purpose you first intended." This man 
had lost his power of conquest because he had shut 
Jesus out of his house and heart. All our triumph 
is "through him that loved us." In fellow- 
ship with Jesus, trusting in him, we are per- 
fectly safe. 

A lady was once riding in her carriage, when 
she noticed a beautiful flower growing in the shel- 
ter of a large rock. She stopped, intending to 
remove it to her garden, but found that, delicate 
as it appeared, it resisted all her efforts, because 
the root ran under the rock and so entwined about 
it that it could not be separated from it. Dear 
friend, if the roots of your love and fellowship run 
under and twine about the Rock of Ages, your life 



THE PROMISE OF VICTORY 299 



shall be safe in that shelter, and no enemy shall 
be able to dislodge you. 

To any who hear me who have not yet yielded 
to the invitation of Jesus Christ to accept salva- 
tion, I want lovingly and earnestly to press home 
upon your heart and your conscience the great 
message that your only possibility of salvation 
from sin and the fearful wages which sin earns 
is through Jesus Christ, who loves you, and who 
gave himself for you. It is not only that he has 
paid the debt of sin on the cross, and made it 
possible for God to be just and yet the justifier 
of him who believes on Christ, but also because 
you have so entangled your soul in the meshes of 
sin, of vain imaginations, and of evil habit, that 
no one but Jesus Christ is able to bring you out 
from your dangerous situation and guide you to 
goodness, to peace, to safety, to happiness, and to 
heaven. 

Mr. J. W. Bothem, a traveling salesman and a 
most earnest Christian worker, has published a 
little book entitled Earthly Stories with Heavenly 
Meanings, in which he tells this incident: Years 
ago Paul Morphy was the champion chess player of 
the world. A friend of his one day invited him 
to come and look at a valuable painting he had just 
purchased. It was called "The Chess Player," 



300 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

and represented Satan playing chess with a young 
man, the stake being the man's sonl. The game 
had reached the stage where it was the young 
man's move; but to the average looker-on at the 
picture he seemed to be checkmated. There seemed 
to be no move he could make that would not mean 
defeat for him, and the strong feature of the pic- 
ture was the look of awful despair that was on 
the man's face as he realized his soul was lost and 
the cruel, hideous grin that was on Satan's face 
as he saw his victory. 

Paul Morphy studied the picture for a long 
time. He knew more about chess than did the 
artist who painted the picture, and after a while 
he called for a chessboard and men, and, placing 
them in exactly the same position as they were 
in the painting, he said, "I'll take the young man's 
place, and make the move ;" and he made the move 
that would have defeated Satan and set the young 
man free. 

O my friend, you who are caught in the meshes 
of folly and sin until you seem to be checkmated at 
every move, that story may illustrate your life. 
In the game of life you have been morally worsted 
and sin has you at a disadvantage. Move wherever 
you will, the end is disaster. I long to help you 
to see this day the face of the Divine Kedeemer, 



THE PBOMISE OF VICTORY 301 



who knows you, and knows all about your life, and 
who has been tempted in all points like as you are, 
who is acquainted with all the machinations of 
the devil, and who is able and willing to come and 
take your place and make the move that will set 
you free. And the man whom Christ sets free is 
free indeed. You will not only be a conqueror, but 
more than a conqueror, through him that loves 
you. 



302 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



XXVIII 

The Promise of the Morning 

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comet'h in 
the morning. — Psalm xxx, 5. 

The promise of the morning in this psalm of 
David reminds us of that poetic outburst of Paul 
where he exclaims, "Our light affliction, which is but 
for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory." The Christian is 
not exempt from the trying experiences that are 
incident to our human life. He lives in the body, 
the same as others, and the body is constantly get- 
ting older, and like an old house needs patching 
up, and ever and anon afflictions and trials, which 
are frequently God's messengers to us to teach us, 
will come. But these are only incidental. They 
are like the night, which may be dark and dreary, 
but which vanishes before the dawn of the day 
and gives way to the glorious promise of the morn- 
ing. This text is a promise that no night shall 
be permanent to the good man, and though the 
night of weeping may come, and must be expected, 
the sunshine of the morning shall dry its tears. 



THE PROMISE OF THE MORNING 303 



Is it not well, however, that we should permit 
the shadowy foreground of this bright promise to 
solemnize our hearts with a consideration of the 
great truth that tears are a part of this world's 
experience? The shadows are just as certainly a 
part of the necessary experience of this life we are 
living as the sunshine. And as in a land where 
there is nothing but sunshine there is barrenness 
and desert, so tears and clouds and difficulties are 
essential characteristics of a fertile moral and 
spiritual nature. 

Father Ryan, with the soul of a mystic, has, 
withal, rare spiritual insight, and in one of his 
poems he brings out with great clearness the sober- 
ing fact that the shadows and the tears must be 
expected. He sings: 

"There never was a valley without some faded flower, 

There never was a heaven without some little cloud; 
The face of day may flash with light in any morning 
hour, 

But evening soon will come with her shadow-woven 
shroud. 

"There never was a river without its mists of gray, 
There never was a forest without its fallen leaf; 
And Joy may walk beside us down the windings of our 
way, 

When lo! there sounds a footstep, and we meet the 
face of Grief. 



304 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

"There never was a seashore without its drifting wreck, 
There never was an ocean without its moaning wave; 
And the golden gleams of glory the summer sky that fleck, 
Shine where dead stars are sleeping in their azure- 
mantled grave. 

"There never was a streamlet, however crystal clear, 
Without a shadow resting on the ripples of its tide; 
Hope's brightest robes are broidered with the sable 
fringe of fear, 
And she lures us, but abysses girt her path on either 
side. 

"The shadow of the mountain falls athwart the lovely 
plain, 

And the shadow of the cloudlet hangs above the 
mountain's head; 
And the highest hearts and lowest wear the shadow of 
some pain, 

And the smile has scarcely flitted ere the anguished 
tear is shed. 

"For no eyes have there been ever without a weary tear, 
And those lips cannot be human that have never 
heaved a sigh; 
For without the dreary winter there has never been a 
year, 

And the tempests hide their terrors in the calmest 
summer sky. 

"The cradle means the coffin, and the coffin means the 
grave; 

The mother's song scarce hides the De profundis of 
the priest; 

You may cull the fairest roses any May-day ever gave, 
But they wither while you wear them ere the ending 
of your feast. 



THE PKOMISE OF THE MORNING 305 



"So this dreary life is passing — and we move amid its 
maze, 

And we grope along together, half in darkness, half 
in light; 

And our hearts are often burdened by the mysteries of 
our ways, 

Which are never all in shadow and are never wholly 
bright. 

"And our dim eyes ask a beacon, and our weary feet a 
guide, 

And our hearts of all life's mysteries seek the mean- 
ing and the key; 
And a cross gleams o'er our pathway — on it hangs the 
Crucified, 

And he answers all our yearnings by the whisper, 
'Follow me.' 

"Life is a burden; bear it. 
Life is a duty; dare it. 
Life is a thorn crown; wear it. 

Though it break your heart in twain, 
Though the burden crush you down, 
Close your lips and hide the pain; 
First the cross, and then the crown." 

But sobering as are the reflections of the poet, 
and sober as are the facts in our everyday life, the 
blessed promise of God still remains, a promise 
which he will not fail to keep, that after the night 
of weeping, to every true soul, there shall come 
the morning, with all that that signifies in hope 
and courage and joy. 
20 



306 THE GEEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

The morning means opportunity — opportunity 
to do the work for which our fingers itch and our 
hearts long. David speaks in another place about 
taking "the wings of the morning." The morning 
has wings, wings of light that travel rapidly. The 
morning means a wide horizon, an open field, and 
a fair chance for exertion. God will not fail to 
give every true soul an opportunity. Sometimes it 
will not come in the way we expect. When John 
Bunyan had found forgiveness of his sins, and his 
rapturous soul danced with thanksgiving to God 
all day long, and his tongue longed to give honor 
to Christ, a wicked king thrust him into jail. 
Bunyan groaned and felt that it was the end of 
opportunity. But it is quite likely that if the king 
had left Bunyan alone we never would have heard 
of him. If he had preached to his heart's content 
he might have done a good deal of good to a few 
thousand people, and then he would have died, and 
in a generation or two his name would have been 
forgotten. The devil overleaped himself when he 
put Bunyan in the Bedford jail. It was opening 
the wings of the morning to him. There he wrote 
Pilgrim's Progress, and his audience from hun- 
dreds and thousands was multiplied into untold 
millions. Before, he could only speak one language, 
and now he was to speak in every great tongue on 



THE PROMISE OF THE MORNING 307 

the globe. His weeping endured for a night, but 
untold joy and victory came with the morning. 

Paul had his nights of weeping; he had many 
journeys he wished to make, and many preaching 
campaigns upon which he wished to enter; and 
if he had been permitted, those wonderful letters 
to the Komans, to the Corinthians, to the Gala- 
tians, to the Ephesians, to the Thessalonians, and 
others, that add so much to the comfort and in- 
spiration of the Christian world, would never have 
been written. Before he died Paul had come to 
know that even on other grounds his imprisonment 
and his chains had been an advantage to him and 
to the world. His discouragement and his weep- 
ing tarried for a night, but the morning of joy and 
hope and thanksgiving came to him in their turn. 

Let us do our duty and make sure that our 
morning of opportunity will come for us. We may 
not know it when it comes at first, but we shall 
come to recognize that all things are working to- 
gether for our good, and our tears shall be wiped 
away by the warmth of the morning sun. 

The promise of the morning is a promise of 
courage for the good and of rebuke for the evil. 
Honest people are housed up at night. It is the 
burglar who goes forth in the dark. The things 
that prey upon the world go out under the cover 



308 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

of night; owls seek their prey; wolves and rav- 
enous beasts find their greatest opportunity at 
night. In the morning man and all the beasts 
which are his servants are awake and alive with 
activity. The great work of the world is done 
in the daytime. While modern civilization has 
added a great deal of night work, it is, after all, 
but a very small part compared with the work of 
the day. The great majority of men and women 
sleep at night and fill the day with the hum of 
their industry, the shouts of their rejoicing, and 
the cheering notes of their courageous achieve- 
ments. All this should encourage us in times of 
gloom and disappointment. Has the night fallen 
upon you ? Do you find yourself in the midst of 
seeming defeat in your plans, your eyes full of 
tears? Then there is just one thing to do, and 
that is to trust God and do right, so long as this 
night of weeping shall last. One thing is sure, it 
is not permanent. You have the absolute promise 
of God that no trial shall come to you that is not 
the common, ordinary lot for the rest of mankind. 
You have also the assurance that if you will go 
quietly on doing right, and bearing your burdens 
with meekness and confidence, God will, himself, 
devise a way for your escape out of these present 
complication. You have still further assurance 



THE PEOMISE OF THE MORNING 309 

that, while you are suffering these afflictions and 
trials, if you remain true to God they shall act 
on you exactly as a furnace acts on the ore that is 
cast into it, the dross shall be separated from the 
gold and all the precious metal shall be preserved. 
What a sacred time, then, it is when we are in a 
time of unexpected darkness ! The night of weep- 
ing is sacred. It is full of mystery and possi- 
bility. Beyond it lies the morning, and if we trust 
God we shall meet it stronger, nobler men and 
women than we were when the night overtook us. 

As Christians we must not forget that God often 
makes us his messengers of the morning to other 
souls who are weeping in the darkness of the night. 
How manifest this was in the life of Jesus! 
Wherever he walked, whatever the time of the day, 
the morning dawned in troubled souls who were 
blessed by his words and deeds. And the sweetest 
privilege that can come to us is the opportunity 
to usher in the morning to some night-bound soul. 
Alas, that we should miss so many opportunities 
through our selfishness and indifference ! 

Two little children were playing in a beautiful 
garden when suddenly the boy jumped to his feet, 
and shouted, harshly: "Go away from there, you 
beggar. You have no right to be looking at our 
flowers." 



310 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

Another boy, about the age of the one who had 
spoken, who was pale, dirty, and ragged, was lean- 
ing against the fence, admiring the splendid show 
of roses and tulips within. His face reddened 
with anger at the rude language, and he was about 
to answer defiantly when a little girl sprang out 
from the arbor, and, looking at both, said to her 
brother: "How could you speak so, Herbert? I 
am sure his looking at the flowers doesn't hurt us." 
And then, to soothe the wounded feelings of the 
stranger, she added, "I'll give you some flowers 
if you will wait a moment," and she gathered a 
beautiful bouquet and handed it through the fence. 

His face brightened with surprise and pleasure, 
and he earnestly thanked her. 

Twelve years after this occurred the girl had 
grown to be a woman. One bright afternoon she 
was walking with her husband in the same garden 
when she observed a young man in workman's 
dress leaning over the fence and looking attentively 
at her and the flowers. Turning to her husband, 
she said : "It does me good to see people admiring 
the garden. I'll give that young man some of the 
flowers. Approaching him, she said: "Are you 
fond of flowers, sir. It will give me great pleasure 
to gather you some." 

The young workman looked a moment into her 



THE PEOMISE OF THE MORNING 311 



face, and then said, in a voice tremulous with feel- 
ing: "Twelve years ago I stood here, a ragged, 
hopeless little beggar boy, and you showed me the 
same kindness. The bright flowers and your pleas- 
ant words made a new boy of me — aye, and they 
made a man of me, too. Your face, madam, has 
been a light to me in my dark hours of life ; and 
now, thank God, though that boy is still a humble, 
hard-working man, he is an honest and grateful 
one." 

Tears stood in the eyes of the lady as, turning 
to her husband, she said: "God put it into my 
young heart to do that little act of kindness, and 
see how great a reward it has brought !" She had 
been God's messenger to open the gates of dawn to 
that soul. God waits every day to give to you and 
to me opportunities equally precious and glorious. 

But surely I ought not to close our study with- 
out saying to any who are night-bound by sin that 
your darkness may also vanish in blessed hope and 
promise if you will give yourself to the sugges- 
tion of our text. The night of sin, the sorrow and 
the bondage which evil habits have brought to 
your heart, are not strong enough to resist the 
morning light of hope and forgiveness which may 
come to you in Jesus Christ. Has the night been 
long ? Has the gloom of guilt hung threateningly 



312 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

over your head ? Has the sting of remorse burned 
in your conscience? Have your eyes been wet 
with tears at the shame of your transgressions? 
Has your heart been full of fear and sunk into 
hopelessness as you have struggled to do the good 
and to resist the wrong, and yet have failed ? O, let 
me speak to you of Jesus, the Saviour, whose face 
is like the morning, and who is able to save unto 
the uttermost everyone who will come unto God 
by him. Give him your heart, rest your faith on 
him, and the night shall pass, and the morning 
shall dawn. 



REWARD OF THE OVERCOMERS 313 



XXIX 

The Promised Eeward of the Overcomers 

To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden 
manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the 
stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving 
he that receiveth it. — Revelation ii, 17. 

There is something very significant in the way 
that, over and over again in these chapters, the 
Christian rewards are made to hinge on that one 
condition of victory. "To him that overcometh" 
promise after promise is made. Nothing could 
more seriously suggest to us that life is a battle- 
field and that we are called to be soldiers of Jesus 
Christ. No man will get to heaven without ear- 
nest struggle, and one might truthfully say that 
no man will be fit to go to heaven without struggle. 
Only that positive goodness which comes from defi- 
nite choice between good and bad, and earnest 
battle for the good, could put us into harmony with 
those royal soldiers of Jesus Christ who have dared 
everything for their divine Lord. 

Alfred Austin, the English poet laureate, has 
written a poem in which he treats that legend con- 
cerning Peter, that after Nero had burned the city 



314 THE GKEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

of Borne and then accused the Christians of doing 
it Peter was urged to leave the city to save his life. 
He did not know what to do. He wanted to be 
faithful to Jesus, and yet he wished to live. His 
friends told him that the church had other use 
for him and that he must flee. But Peter says : 

"Do lords of spear and shield 
Thus leave their hosts uncaptained on the field? 

Nay, my task is plain. 
But weak I stand, and I beseech you all 
Urge me no more, lest at a touch I fall." 

Then another friend, a beautiful youth who loves 
Peter with all his heart, pleads: 

"My sire and brethren, yesterday 
The heathen did with ghastly torments slay. 
Pain like a worm beneath their feet they trod: 
Their souls went up like incense unto God. 
An offering richer yet can Heaven require? 
Oh! live, and be my brethren and my sire." 

Then Peter urges that if they love him they must 
leave him alone and not overpersuade him, and 
yet he permits himself to hesitate, a dangerous 
thing where duty is at stake. When a man knows 
his duty he must never allow it to be an open 
question. To do that is to lose everything. One 
voice, the stern voice of conscience, is whispering 
in his heart, "Stay." Then there is another voice, 
a voice from without, which says, "Go." 



EEWAED OF THE OVEECOMEES 



315 



"And louder every moment, 'Go,' it cried; 
And 'Tarry' to a whisper died. 
And as a leaf, when summer is o'erpast, 
Hangs trembling ere it fall in some chance blast, 
So hung his trembling purpose; and fell dead. 



"And he arose and hurried forth and fled 
From all that heaven of love, that hell of hate, 
To the Campagna, glimmering wide and still; 
And strove to think he did his Master's will. 
But spectral eyes and mocking tongues pursued; 
And with vague hands he fought a phantom brood." 

But though Peter starts to flee, he is not happy. 
He tries to make the argument sound logical. He 
says, "Can I not do more living than dead ?" But 
he doubts it more every step. Finally he can stand 
it no longer, and he falls on his knees in the 
Appian Way and pours out his soul to God. 

" 'Master, who judgest, have I done amiss?' 
Lo, in the darkness breaks a wandering ray; 
A vision flash along the Appian Way. 
Divinely in the pagan night it shone, 
A mournful face; a figure hurrying on: 
Though haggard and disheveled, frail and worn, 
A King, of David's lineage, crowned with thorn. 
'Lord, whither farest?' Peter, wondering cried. 
'To Rome,' said Christ; 'to be recrucified.' " 



"Into the night the vision ebbed, like breath, 
And Peter turned, and rushed on Rome and death.' 



316 THE GKEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

We cannot come into the charmed circle of men 
who have known such struggles and won such vic- 
tories except through honorable and victorious 
battle. 

But the promises which Christ makes to his sol- 
diers who overcome their sins through his grace 
are very splendid. First, there is the promise of 
sufficient food to sustain the victorious campaign. 
The hidden manna is promised to the victor. We 
know what that hidden manna was in Christ's 
case. He had meat to eat that the disciples knew 
not of, and he declared to them that it was his meat 
and drink to do the will of God. Jesus himself 
says that he is the bread of life upon which we 
may feed and never die. The Hebrews ate the 
manna in the wilderness, and yet they died, many 
of them very young; but we have the promise of 
our Lord that if we eat the hidden manna we shall 
have immortality. The soul cannot be fed upon 
the things which feed the body. The rich fool 
whom Christ portrays in the gospel was going to 
do that, but he could not. The soul must have 
higher food. It must be fed with the food of 
faith and hope and love, which can give it courage 
though the body dies. 

A story is related of a captain as he lay on the 
battlefield of Shiloh. He was suffering greatly 



EEWAED OF THE OVEECOMEES 317 

from a fatal gunshot wound and from thirst. 
Speaking of it to the chaplain a little afterward, 
he said: "The stars shone out clear and beautiful 
above the dark field ; and I began to think of that 
great God who had given his Son to die a death 
of agony for me; and that he was up there — up 
above the scene of suffering, and above those 
glorious stars; and I felt that I was going home 
to meet him and praise him there ; and I felt that 
I ought to praise God, even wounded and on the 
battlefield. I could not help singing that beautiful 
hymn, 'When I can read my title clear.' And 
there was a Christian brother in the brush near 
me ; I could not see him, but I could hear him. 
He took up the strains, and beyond him another 
and another caught it up. All over that terrible 
battlefield of Shiloh that night the echo was re- 
sounding; and we made the field of battle ring 
with the hymns of praise to God." Those men 
had the hidden manna ; their knapsacks may have 
been empty and their canteens dry, but they fed 
on the hidden manna and their souls were com- 
forted and inspired. 

Have you the hidden manna ? If not, you may 
have it. It is a shame to go with an empty larder 
while you call yourself by the name of Jesus. 
Christ is an abundant provider, and if we really 



318 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

stand with integrity for him, and overcome in his 
name, we shall have an abundance of the heavenly 
food. 

There is another beautiful promise to the vic- 
torious Christian — the promise of the white stone. 
It is possible that this figure may have been in- 
tended as a reference to a custom in connection 
with the ancient national games. If so, the illus- 
tration is very sublime. You see before you a vast 
amphitheater, with seats rising, tier on tier, 
crowded with eager and excited spectators. Sweet 
perfume drops through the canopy which shelters 
from the burning sun, and clouds of dust rise from 
the chariot wheels, from the glowing hoofs of the 
flying horses, and from the swift feet of those who 
run. As you watch and listen you suddenly hear 
a mighty shout that seems to almost rend the skies, 
as the cheers of the thousands echo round the 
scene ; and presently a man steps forward who has 
won the race, or slain the lion, or killed the gladi- 
ator, to receive from the emperor's own hand a 
crown of laurel leaves, which fades by the very- 
heat of the head that wears it. But the emperor 
gives him something more permanent in its value 
than that. In addition to the wreath he gives him 
a pure white stone, with his name written on it. 
This entitles him, on presentation, to be fed at 



BEWAED OF THE OVEECOMEES 319 

the expense of the nation and to be feted and hon- 
ored wherever he goes. If we accept this as the 
illustration intended, and lift it up into the spir- 
itual realm, how glorious is its promise ! Christ 
bestows upon us, when we overcome our sins in 
his name and in his power, the white heart, the 
white soul, and that is the ticket before which all 
barriers go down and every door of heaven swings 
wide open. Jesus himself has said, "Blessed are 
the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 

The final promise to the victor is that of the 
new name. There are many illustrations in the 
Bible which make this promise very interesting to 
us. God gave Abraham a new name. Originally 
his name was Abram, but because of his fidelity 
and the courage and faithfulness by which he over- 
came all trials and temptations and became known 
throughout the land wherever he went as "the 
friend of God," God changed his name to Abraham 
as a token of honor and love. 

Jacob obtained his new name in a peculiar way. 
All his life, up to middle age, he had been known 
as J acob, the supplanter. But on his way back to 
his father's house, when he learned that his brother 
was coming against him with an army, all the sins 
of his youth came back to haunt him, and he spent 
a night in an agony of prayer. It seemed to Jacob 



320 THE GEEAT PEOMISES OF THE BIBLE 

as though an angel came and wrestled with him, 
and that night he overcame all his selfishness and 
meanness ; he surrendered himself with all his soul 
and body to do the will of God ; from that day he 
was a different man, and God said to him that he 
would change his name. He would no longer call 
him Jacob, the supplanter, but he would call him 
Israel, which signified a prince, one who had 
power with God and with man, and had prevailed. 

Paul started into the world as Saul. As Saul 
he was bigoted, selfish, hard-hearted, and cruel. 
But when on the way to Damascus he was met with 
a vision of Jesus Christ, and was smitten down 
with the consciousness of his sin, and repented, 
the old name of Saul, which had so many wicked 
and evil associations with it, was taken away, and 
he became known as Paul, a beautiful and a glori- 
ous name, which he wore in honor to the day of 
his death. And so there were many others, like 
Boanerges and Peter, where the new name ex- 
pressed the step which had been taken into a nobler, 
holier life, and the change of heart and the lofti- 
ness of character consequent upon it. So to every 
one of us, when we with faithful hearts overcome 
our temptations to sin and in Jesus's name and 
strength come off victorious and do the right, 
Christ will not only give the hidden manna, and 



REWARD OF THE OVERCOMEBS 321 



bestow upon us the white stone of a pure heart, 
but he will give us the new name, a love name, 
which no one else will know ; but it will be a dear 
name by which he knows us and calls us. 

If any discouraged soul is ready to say, "0, yes, 
that is all very well for the victor, but the promise 
there is all to the one who overcomes, and I am 
constantly being overcome" — to such a one I wish 
to say that you are not required to overcome in a 
lonely fight by yourself. God will help you. The 
Lord Jesus Christ, your Saviour, will help you. 
The Holy Spirit will help you. You shall be 
inspired. You shall be divinely strengthened. 
Once throw your whole self into it, and you will 
not lack for allies. Be sure you put yourself in, 
that's all. Heaven will not come from the out- 
side and give you the victory while you are playing 
traitor or remain indifferent. Throw your soul 
into it and, whatever the odds on the other side, 
you shall overcome. In England, not long ago, 
a lecturer had been speaking against Christianity 
in a factory town. When the lecture was done one 
of the mill hands stood up and said : "I would like 
to ask the lecturer this one question : Thirty years 
ago I was the curse of this town and everybody in 
it. I tried to do better and failed. The teetotalers 
got hold of me, and I signed the pledge and broke 
21 



322 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

it. The police took me and sent me to prison, and 
the wardens tried to make me better, and I began 
to drink as soon as I left my cell. When all had 
failed I took Christ as my Saviour, and he made 
a new man of me. I am a member of the church, 
a class leader, superintendent of the Sunday school. 
If Christ is a myth and religion is untrue, how 
could I be so helped by them ?" My friend, Christ 
will do for you whatever you need to make you a 
victorious Christian. Only one thing must you do 
— give him yourself, 



THE PEOMISE OF IMMORTALITY 323 



XXX 

The Promise of Immortality 

Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. 
— John xi, 26. 

Lazarus was dead, and the cry of a sister's 
broken heart had gone out across the land to Jesus. 
Christ had responded to that cry, as he ever will, 
and was now drawing near with his disciples to 
the house where his friends lived. Martha, who 
is on the watch for him, runs down the road to meet 
him, and impulsively calls aloud, "If thou hadst 
been here my brother had not died !" Christ as- 
sures her that her brother will rise again, and she 
replies that she does not doubt he will rise again 
at the resurrection of the dead on the last day, but 
for the present, and for all these intervening years, 
Lazarus seems dead to her. It was in his effort 
to rob death of this awful loneliness, and give this 
friend a new sense of the reality of the ever-living 
soul, that Jesus continued the conversation with 
the declaration of the text, "Whosoever liveth and 
believeth in me shall never die." 

Mr. Spurgeon used to say that we do with the 



324 THE GREAT PROMISES OP THE BIBLE 

promises of the Bible often as a poor old couple 
did with a certain precious document, which might 
have cheered their old age had they used it accord- 
ing to its real value. A gentleman stepping into 
a poor man's house saw framed and glazed upon 
the wall a French note for a thousand francs. He 
said to the old folks, "How came you by this?" 
They informed him that a poor French soldier 
had been taken in by them and nursed until he 
died, and he had given them that little picture 
when he was dying, as a memorial of him. They 
thought it such a pretty souvenir that they had 
framed it, and there it was adorning the cottage 
wall. They were greatly surprised when they were 
told it was worth a sum which would be quite a 
little fortune to them if they would but turn it into 
money. We are equally unpractical with far more 
sacred and more precious things. Here are these 
words of promise which God gave us to feed upon 
as the very bread of heaven. But how often we 
frame them and glaze them in our minds and 
hearts, and we speak in a complimentary way 
about them and say to ourselves, "They are so 
sweet and precious," and yet we never put them in 
at the bank and turn them into actual blessing in 
our hours of need. You have done as Martha did 
when she took the words, "Thy brother shall rise 



THE PROMISE OF IMMORTALITY 325 

again," and put round about them this handsome 
frame, "In the resurrection at the last day." Who 
here this morning is not sufficiently acquainted 
with the promises of God to insure salvation and 
to give the peace that passeth all understanding 
before the day is out, if you would but turn these 
precious lodes of bullion in God's Word into 
current coin for your spiritual confidence and 
peace ? 

The essence of our theme is the indestructibility 
of the soul. When Lazarus was laid away in his 
grave the body was dead. In that body all life had 
stopped. Every organ had ceased to perform its 
functions and it was fast falling into decay, like 
a house deserted to the storm and left a prey to 
the elements. But Lazarus, the thinking, hoping, 
immortal soul, was not dead. The vital, ever- 
living personality was alive, and Jesus in speaking 
of it to the disciples said, "Our friend Lazarus 
sleepeth." The spirit does not grow old with the 
body. Sometimes, under the stress of pain in the 
human house, the mental faculties may grow 
weak ; but that is only caused by the conditions of 
the dwelling, and when that pressure is taken off 
the soul will know all the glorious sensations of 
eternal youth. Nothing is more magnificent in 
the history of man than the way the soul rejoices 



326 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

and triumphs in rising superior to all the pains of 
the body and to all fears of its dissolution. 

When Frances Ridley Havergal, the Christian 
poet, was taken suddenly ill, and the doctor spoke 
to her about her illness, fearing that she did not 
realize how dangerous was her condition, he found 
she was prepared for him, and in reply to his mes- 
sage she said : "I thought so ; hut it is really too 
good to be true that I am going. Doctor, do you 
really think I'm going V 9 

a Yes." 

"To-day?" 

"Probably." 

Then she exclaimed, "Beautiful, splendid, to be 
so near the gate of heaven !" 

Then, after a spasm of pain, she nestled down 
in the pillows, and said, "There, now; it is all 
over — blessed rest." Then she tried to sing, and 
she struck one glad, high note of praise to Christ, 
but could sing only one word, "He," and then all 
was still. She finished it in heaven. 

The Christian's life is like the experience of 
some rivers in southern California. A river is 
born back amid the lofty mountains, fed by snow- 
drifts and by springs from the high places. It 
comes splashing and leaping down from the high 
hills ; it sings songs that are full of glee and mer- 



THE PEOMISE OF IMMORTALITY 327 

riment; it roars in the cataract for very joy of 
existence ; on and on, growing ever larger, through 
the foothills and toward the valley it rolls, deep- 
ening and widening its current; it gives to every- 
thing, and yet constantly increases; birds and 
squirrels, and all the wild things of the woods, 
and the hills, and then the flocks and herds and vil- 
lages drink at its rim. It satisfies them all, and 
sweeps onward, ever growing greater until it meets 
the desert, and then, suddenly, without much 
premonition or prophecy, it sinks into the sand and 
is gone. Go on a mile, or two miles, or ten, and 
there is nothing to show for it; but pursue your 
course perhaps twenty miles away, and out of the 
sand up springs your river, stronger, fuller than 
ever, pouring on across the plain, and the flowers 
blossom, the soil grows rich, the fields green, and 
the trees clap their hands wherever the river com- 
eth on its way to the illimitable sea. Our life is 
like that. Down from the mountains of childhood 
we come, buoyant, full of rollicking vigor; out 
through the foothills of youth and young manhood, 
singing with the very joy of living, on through 
the valley, growing stronger and greater by strug- 
gle and trial. Into the spirit of the Christ we 
grow, learning from him how much more blessed 
it is to give than to receive. Like the river, the 



328 THE GEEAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

more blessings we give away, the wider our cur- 
rent, and then, suddenly, without much premoni- 
tion, death looms before us. Our current was 
never so strong as now ; we never knew the world so 
well ; we were never able to do so much for it as 
now. But here is death, and we sink into the earth. 
But in J esus Christ we know that our life no more 
ceases when it is lost in the shades of death 
than the Humboldt Kiver stills its current when 
it passes out of sight in the sand. ISTo, indeed; 
on through the tunnel of death flows the current 
of our immortality, and up and out on the other 
side, amid the bright fields of Eden, our life shall 
flow on forever. Moses found his grave in the 
valley of Moab. But that tremendous vitality, 
that glorious spirit which led the children of Israel 
out of Egypt, was not quenched there, for he 
appears again on the Mount of Transfiguration 
in blessed sympathy with the Christ. And Jesus 
Christ, nailed to the cross on Calvary, pierced to 
the heart by the Roman soldier's spear, cried, "It 
is finished," and they laid him down in the tomb 
of J oseph in the garden, and rolled the stone across 
the sepulcher's mouth, and the seal of the govern- 
ment was put upon it. Stout soldiers from Gaul 
kept sleepless watch about that tomb, but the 
Christ, who had been in Paradise with the dying 



THE PROMISE OF IMMORTALITY 329 

thief who had been transformed by faith in him, 
returned on Easter morning to take possession of 
the wounded body that had been his home for three 
and thirty years. Like a flash of lightning the 
angel descended and rolled back the stone from the 
mouth of the tomb, while the soldiers fell like dead 
men, and Christ came forth in triumph. He ap- 
peared in the same body, glorified and spiritual- 
ized, a pledge that all who sleep in him shall have 
bodies fashioned like unto it. The life of Jesus 
did not end on the cross. The body was slain 
there, but the personality, the soul, did not die. 

There can be only one thought for us all this 
morning, and that is, that in Jesus Christ we may 
triumph over the fear and the power of death. 
Without Christ and this blessed Easter hope men 
are in bondage to the fear of death. One man 
when he came to die shouted aloud, "Stop that 
clock !" The clock hung opposite his bed. He 
knew he was dying, and he was not ready. He 
had the impression that he was to die at midnight. 
He heard the ticking of the clock, and it was agony 
in his ear. He saw the hands, minute by minute, 
approaching the dreaded hour, and he had no hope. 
In his blind terror he cried out, "Stop that clock !" 
His weeping friends stopped the clock; but 2 alas, 
that could not aid him ! Time moved on just the 



330 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 



same. Eternity made its swift approach, and the 
stopping of the clock could not prepare him to meet 
his God. How different was the feeling of an 
earnest Bible class teacher who, when his friends 
told him that death was at hand, said to them, 
"Then throw back the shutters and let the 
sunshine in!" 

To the Christian the promise of immortality is 
the most glorious promise in the world, because it 
is the promise of blessed reunion with those who 
have gone before. Who so poor that he has not 
some treasures in heaven that are more precious 
than all the riches held in the strong boxes of any 
safe-deposit vault on the globe ? It is well to 
recall them this Easter morning — our own group, 
the father who held us so strongly in his arms 
when we were little, who hoped and planned for 
us as we grew larger; the mother into whose face 
we looked first for love and sympathy, and whose 
heart never ceased to beat with fidelity while she 
remained on earth. 0, the loneliness when she 
died ! The husband, the wife, the little children, 
bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, it seemed to 
tear our very hearts from our bosoms when death 
came for them. Ah, this Easter morning our 
hearts grow warm with hope and trust. They are 
not dead ; they are living ; they are in the Father's 



THE PROMISE OF IMMORTALITY 331 

house ; and in the midst of them, the center of their 
joy, is the glorious Christ. The marks of the 
thorns are on his brow ; there are nail prints in his 
hands; but the love and the glory of his face are 
beyond description. If there be a lonely one here 
— it may be one orphaned from childhood, to whom 
the world has been poor in friendships, and to 
whom even heaven seems a lonely spot — how glori- 
ous the thought that you may so enter into fellow- 
ship with Jesus Christ as your Saviour and your 
friend here that you shall rejoice in his presence 
and fellowship forever. 

There was once a poor Chinaman who by some 
strange set of circumstances found himself alone 
in London. He was walking along the streets one 
day in a fog and a drizzling rain, wellnigh break- 
ing his heart with longing for his native land, 
when suddenly the sun burst forth bright and clear, 
drove the clouds away, and lifted the fog. The 
little Chinaman cheered up amazingly. 

"Why, what is the matter with you to-day? 
What is the cause of your rejoicing V* asked an 
acquaintance. 

"What is the cause, indeed ?" replied the China- 
man, pointing with his .finger to the sky. "Don't 
you see there ? That is China's sun." And as he 
said it he danced on the pavement like a schoolboy. 



332 THE GREAT PROMISES OF THE BIBLE 

Everything else was strange to him — the streets, 
the inhabitants, the scenery, even the stars. The 
only thing he beheld in London that he had seen 
at home was the sun ; but he felt comforted under 
the face of the same sun. 

So I thank God that if there be a lonely soul on 
earth, who cannot remember his father or his 
mother, who has never known the blessed fellow- 
ship of wife or husband, who has never looked into 
the deep heavenly eyes of childhood and felt the 
Godlike throb of fatherhood or motherhood, still 
there may be such divine fellowship of soul with 
Jesus Christ, the Saviour, that heaven will be 
glorious and beautiful and homelike because the 
same Saviour that we have known here, who has 
been the most precious blessing of our earthly life, 
shall be the center of heaven's beauty and glory 
throughout all eternity. The Christ who knocked 
at the door of our hearts when we were sinners ; 
the Christ who stretched out his arms to us when 
we were burdened, saying, "Come unto me, all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest the Christ who has stood by us in every 
dark hour, who has come to us when the waves 
ran high about us and the night was dark, saying 
to us, "Lo, it is I; be not afraid!" the Christ 
who said to us, "In my Father's house are many 



THE PROMISE OF IMMORTALITY 333 

mansions. ... I go to prepare a place for you. 
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will 
come again, and receive you unto myself; that 
where I am, there ye may be also" — this is the 
Christ who shall be our King and our Lord in 
heaven and in the sunshine of whose face we shall 
abide forever. 



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